Thus Stevan Harnad:
"This will of course all be obvious -- belatedly but
blindingly
-- to historians in hindsight."
JE: Great to have a prophet in our midst, but my concern is
more
that Harnad and others continue to talk about the Internet
as it
was five years ago. The world has moved on. Harnad talks
about
institutional repositories as though they will be with us in
even
a few years (ever hear of Software As A Service--that is,
services like Google and Salesforce.com?); and recently we
had
Heather Morrison on this list extolling one-hour peer
review.
Reading Peter Suber's blog is like getting into a time
machine
that only runs backward.
This debate--open access vs. toll access--is, oh, so very
1990s.
What is happening instead is that open material is being
subsumed
into broader marketing networks, whose ultimate aim is to
drive
revenue (Nature Precedings) or build brands (Harvard open
access
policy). Better to think of open access as product sampling
or
an aspect of brand management. Sorry, Professor Harnad, but
you
lost this one and the Internet won.
Joe Esposito
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