Timothy ElfenbeinYour periodic reminder that just because a piece of writing is about open-access publishing, the authors are under no obligation to publish their piece in an open-access venue. There is also no irony in a piece about open access itself being closed in whatever manner. You can go ahead & write all you want about open access & publish it how ever you want, weighing the effects of your choices. I myself set alight my best writings on open access so that only the gods can read them.
Em Nunn@timelfen is this reminder about the expensive report about OA publishing? Isn't it the choice they made to charge commercial orgs so much for these insights (which is totally understandable on their part) that is depressing for people with a different vision of OA, rather than simply 'isnt it ironic?'
@ebnunn I seem to find a reason every 6 months or so to post this reminder (1st time here tho).
Yes, I was subtooting @petersuber for his post on the Simba report. He made no mention of irony (tho that’s the usual charge w/ “About OA but not OA” comments). I think a more directed criticism would point to such business intelligence reports as a symptom of OAs capture by commercial entities: it’s not really a report for those who want to see OA as anything but a market.
@ebnunn @petersuber I guess for market-oriented OA advocates, the closedness points to the contradiction, in need of calling out: open leads to the more efficient use of knowledge, so a closed report is inefficient. But for the nonmarket-oriented, this isn’t at all what’s significant about reports like these, what they are a symptom of.
@timelfen @petersuber I suppose you could also argue that if decisions are being made based on info in this report then people/orgs that can't afford it are being excluded by its cost, but yes, I was thinking more of what it highlights about OA as a market
@timelfen @petersuber I do generally agree with you about the "OA research should be published OA" as in the professor with a huge grant to pay APCs is not more moral than the ECR publishing in a paywalled special issue relevant to their subdiscipline, although if you have access to an IR it would be good to use it in that case
@ebnunn For me, the question isn’t whether particular groups can afford (financially or reputationally) to publish OA, which assumes all knowledge should ideally be open. I think this takes knowledge as being essentially information, the more the better & originating context doesn’t matter. The question for me is What kind of work is a particular piece of knowledge supposed to do, in what situations? So I’m working with a view of knowledge as being always embedded in particular social relations.
@ebnunn Those most likely making use of a knowledge product like the Simba report are business strategists, for the purpose of increasing market share & returns of their corporate employers. The report aims to give a competitive advantage to paying customers: the whole point of this knowledge product is to be exclusive. Simba isn’t producing this knowledge because it supports OA, or aims to add to our collective knowledge of OA. That’s just not the work their report aims to do.