[GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 8:05 AM, Arthur Sale <ahjs at ozemail.com.au> wrote:

> Stevan
>
> I disagree with you in one regard. I agree that researchers are a main
> target but the general public cannot and should not be omitted. The place
> you go wrong is in your clauses 8 and 9. They are false, though perhaps a
> misguided intent is a better description. Almost all research papers are of
> interest to a subset of the general public (different for each paper, as
> for
> researchers).
>
>
I completely agree with Arthur. It is arrogant and unethical for academics
to claim that research is primarily for academics. There are huge numbers
of people outside academia who are frustrated by lack of access. A similar
arrogance was showed by Lord Winston (an academic medic well kown on TV)
at the Oxford  meeting on "Evolution of Scholarship" where he stated that
the general public shouldn't have access to the medical literature. Even
were this awful premise justifiable, the mechanism of doing it through
pay-barrier access for commercial gain is an appalling way.

I am now "retired" and along with many others feel the effect of being
"scholarly poor". These are the people who want to, but cannot, read the
scholarly literature except at 40 USD per paper per day. Academics don't
care bout them and it's shameful. There are people who change jobs - e.g.
from academia to industry - who overnight get cut off from scholarship. Why
should the taxpayers and student fees and research funders subsidize
library subscriptions in academia if there is this elitism?

Universities have failed to catch the spirit of twenty-first century
information and the world is showing its frustration with them.

To change attitudes and show the importance of the Scholarly Poor the Open
Knowledge Foundation and Mike Taylor has set up resources at
http://whoneedsaccess.org/ and @ccess to show the waste and pain caused by
denying scholarship outside academia. Mike is outside academia - he works
in computing - and yet manages to publish peer-reviewed research in
sauropods (dinosaurs). He has also championed the cause of effective Open
Access outside academia and has several articles in the national presses.

P.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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