Discussing Open Access | … candidly, respectfully, constructively, open-mindedly, inclusively

"This is the text, with slides, of a lecture presented at the Smithsonian Libraries on March 10, 2014 by Rick Anderson, Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections in the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah. Click on any slide to enlarge; italicized notes in parentheses within the text offer links to examples that couldn’t be provided in the original lecture ... One answer is that scholars don’t, in fact, typically want maximum readership above all else. Scholarly communication is about much more than just telling the world what you’ve thought and discovered. It’s also about review and certification. Telling the world that you’ve discovered a cure for cancer is easy — Google the phrase 'cancer cure' and you’ll find a thousand people making just that claim. What’s harder — what scholars and scientists want, and what costs money — is the process of taking submission of those claims; weeding out the obvious nonsense; subjecting the remainder to coordinated review; editing and formatting the papers that make it through that review; and creating and maintaining a robust and well-organized archive of them. Authors want that process to exist because when their work makes it through the process, it signals to their peers that the work is solid scholarship and should be taken seriously. Any model that proposes to do some or all of these things and then give the resulting documents to readers at no charge faces a problem: it will have to get financial support from someone other than readers ..."