Oh no! The EU wants to help - The Common Room Blog | The Australian

“WELL that’s a big blow to the open access scholarly publishing movement.  The European Union is in on the act with a plethora of plans to make research it funds more accessible.  It is hard to imagine a better way to destroy the bottom-up push for reform the open access movement is. Once the EU is done the private sector journal oligopoly will comfortably coexist with Brussels bureaucrats and not much will change for researchers.  Unless of course academics decide to ignore officialdom by coming up with their own answers.  Although ‘accessible’ (as a synonym for understandable) is not often associated with any information from the EU it appears research underway since 2008 has led officials to decide although increased access is very, very complicated (isn’t everything involving the EU?), something must be done!  While its survey reports and briefing papers rate high on the EU’s opaque index it seems ‘something’ will involve spending more public money- to subsidise researchers and even fund publishers.  There are many words, but not a lot of information here, but the general sense is that the EU cannot contemplate a radical alternative to the existing model. Understandably so. There is no doubting the back-end of the journal industry is enormously complex – but for the industry’s poor bloody infantry, the researchers who do the writing, reviewing and editing, its the scholarship they care about.  This is why the journal publishers clean up. They do the indexing, write the search algorithms, undertake the editing and emailing, produce the PDFs - the work that academics and their support staff do not know how to do and are not interested in learning. And so the publishers can charge a premium for their services.  But this does not mean everybody should sit and wait. Replacing an oligopoly with a lower cost monopoly only replicates the problem down the track.  The British Government appears to understand this, hiring Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia to work out ways to open access to research... So here is something Mr Wales could do, produce a guide to the mechanics of publishing a peer-reviewed e-journal so that scholarly associations, research institutions, or come to that mates who work in the same field, can do it for themselves...”