Laboratorytalk newsletter issue 387
Latest Laboratory News from Laboratorytalk
Written by the Laboratorytalk editor Apr 21, 2009
I'm delighted to see two announcements this week which offer small but worthwhile fillips to the open access movement. It seems to me hardly worth stating that knowledge should be free, and in these days of easy and cost-free digital communications there is less and less justification for the stranglehold on knowledge maintained by the old-school academic journals. The arguments are well-rehearsed: a great deal of scientific research is financed with public money, and therefore the fruits of that research should be freely available to the public.
In the bad old days before the global availability of the web, the only practical way to keep up with research was to subscribe - at significant cost - to the these journals. That is no longer the case, but the inertia in the system and the residual prestige of the august organs of knowledge have allowed the profiteering to continue. Slowly and steadily, though, open access is gaining ground. It is a development we welcome and one we would like to see accelerate.
The first news here is from Cambridge Journals, which has just published the journal European Review on behalf of the Academia Europaea, an association of scientists and scholars which aims to promote learning, education and research. European Review is an open access journal all about, err, open access publishing. It includes a series of articles that examine technology developments and what they mean for publishing academic research. Theo D'haen, editor-in-chief of European Review says: "These articles are vital for anyone with an interest in open access and what it means for the future of scholarly publishing. The authors come from a range of disciplines and so are able to present the arguments from a range of viewpoints. The philosophy of Open Access is discussed along with the practicalities of how it can work in a business environment."
To view the articles free of charge, go to: journals.cambridge.org/erw/17:01
The second news item is a little closer to home: the US-based Association for Laboratory Automation (ALA) has had a change of heart regarding open access, and announces that the scientific content published in its official peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of the Association for Laboratory Automation (JALA), will become freely available via (Link) two years after its initial publication. Non-scientific content will continue to be available online immediately upon publication.
While these are both steps in the right direction, they are also of limited impact: the navel-gazing approach of Cambridge Journals allows only the topic of open access to be discussed under open access, while all actual new scientific knowledge remains locked behind an expensive subscription. ALA's toe in the water is encouraging, but the two-year delay makes the policy change somewhat half-hearted. Even so, the days of the exhorbitantly-priced journal subscription must be numbered.
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