Open Access

So I’ve been avoiding the copyright like some sort of medieval plague in the past week. My eyes just glazed over every time I read the phrases ‘fair use’, ‘commons’ or ‘incentive’ and instead of wallowing in my thesis-avoidance I managed to tear out a three thousand word essay on the ethics of open access. Bitchin’.

I originally got turned on to this phenomenon through danah boyd. Her essay/article/rant/post on open access is here. It sounded awesome and all anti-establishment and I was well and truly angry. However having done no actual study on the topic I couldn’t be pissed off. I had no real concept of who I was supposed to be angry at or why. An essay later though, and now I’m down with this movement. I am righteously angry. 

Free scholarly research for the world is the plan allowing for greater intellectual sharing between disciplines and universities, a greater wealth of information for the interested public and an ability for more informed research personally. It also will help libraries to no end considering that currently their budgets are being gutted by a few large and sufficiently hardass commercial publishers. I think this has got way more scope than a lot of copyright related issues.

Scholarly research is the backbone of society and is publicly funded - by the people. It’s also really interesting stuff which people either don’t know about or don’t have the resources to access because journals cost money to subscribe to. So you have people being unable to afford to pay more to access something they’ve already paid for in taxes. Add on to a situation where academics usually work for free to edit and peer review these papers, the only winners are commercial publishing houses whose quality of citation rates (important for any self - respecting academic) are no better than cheaper non-profit or university published journals, despite their prices being drastically higher.      

Here are some sites to check out for open access 

First Monday - Open Access Journal. I love this thing like it’s a brother. Except our fraternal bonding is limited by the face that it’s an online open access journal. 

Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview - The title sounds like it’s some sort of bad Public Television Show. “The Open Access Overview bought to you by Peter Suber!” But it’s actually all you need to know about open access. 

Directory of Open Access Journals: What it says.

 

myfriends, my space

danah boyd gives a lecture which spans the evolution of social networking sites. Geocities even gets a mention in the Q & A, which is amazing.I remember making a geocities page for my first band. So many good times, and net skillz learnt. Well by the drummer at least. I’m still learning img tags. Man I suck at the internet.    But yes an awesome presentation by one of the best lecturers on the internet.