David Wojick's writings and stuff: Looking ahead at Open Access and US Public Access
ab1630's bookmarks 2018-01-12
Summary:
"Synopsis: The New Year is a time for reflection and Richard Poynder has provided a good hook for reflecting on the US Public Access Program. He has posted a number of structured interviews with various open access thought leaders, basically asking where do we go from here? I have added some reflections on the US Public Access Program.
One of the striking features of the Poynder interview responses (see links below) is that there is no mention of Public Access Program, despite it being by far the biggest mandatory repository system in the world. It covers a significant fraction of all physical, medical and computer science publications, perhaps 20% or more. In some research areas US federal funding is dominant. This lack of acknowledgement, or interest, is despite the fact that Richard specifically asks about the roles of (1) funders and (2) government. Public Access is all about government funders who build and operate extensive journal article collection systems and infrastructure to provide open access. What is not to like? So having studied both public and open access for over five years now, I thought to reflect on this striking situation. There seem to me to be at least two different things going on. First, the US Public Access Program is distributed, unnamed and not publicized. Second it is ideologically not popular with the OA movement, for various reasons...."