Re: Bad Times are Good Times for Open Access?

[Jean-Claude Guedon <jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca>]

In the passage extracted from his recent post and copied below,
Joseph Esposito makes one of his usual mistakes.

Why should OA be subjected toi the vagaries of the marketplace.
Institutional repositories do not work in the market place. A
number of OA journals directly financed by governments are not
subjected to the vagaries of the marketplace. Journals that use a
subscription model or an author-pay model are, but these
categories cannot be equated with Open Access.

Saying that OA is subject to the economy is true, but then, what
is not? And being subject to the economy is not equivalent to
being subject to the market. Only a market fundamentalist - the
very kind of people being broadly debunked by the present
economic crisis - could claim that.

The changing interests of funding agencies may affect journals,
but it does not affect Open Access. Some journals may be
adversely affected by these changes, others may be positively
affected, but OA takes them all in.

The same is true of the changing interests of the interests of
researchers, for the same reasons.

The technological transformations have some macro-effects. For
example, without digitization, OA would never have happened. But
now that digitization is here to stay for a long, long while, new
technologies will not affect OA except to open new possibilities,
new developments.

As for hoping that some technology will manage to stop
unauthorized copying, I still do not see how it would affect OA.
OA has nothing to do with unauthorized copying. OA, in fact,
relies on strong copyright to provide solid licences whereby some
rights are not reserved. Esposito's argument has to do with the
music industry, the video and the videogame industry, not
research results. We shall see if his hopes will pan out in those
areas (and I am not holding my breath), but it has nothing to do
with OA.

It is amazing to see, after so many years, the amount of
confusion that still floats around us. Simply amazing.

Jean-Claude Guedon

Le vendredi 16 janvier 2009 19:30 -0500, Joseph J. Esposito a
ecrit : [snip]

> The fact is that neither OA nor toll-access publishing is
> "sustainable." How could they be?  They are both subject to the
> same vagaries of the marketplace, the economy, and the changing
> interests of funding agencies and the research community, not
> to mention the technological transformation known as "Cloud
> computing," which, through streaming, will pretty much put an
> end to unauthorized copying.

[snip]

>
> Joe Esposito