Dear Dr Rampersad:
In your mail you say, "The idea of Open Access doesn't belong to Peter Suber. Or I would hope not."
I am extremely sorry if I had given you the impression that the idea of open access belonged to Prof. Peter Suber. I just wanted to alert you to his blog, because in my opinion that is an excellent source of information on the open access movement and its coverage is comprehensive. And he is far more knowledgeable than I am and he writes much beter than I do. Please rest assured that Prof. Suber will never claim that the idea of open access belongs to him. He is a professor of philosophy and from all the correspondence I have had with him, the image I have of him is that of a respectable man and a learned scholar who is ready to devote much time and energy to public good causes. In fact I am looking forward to the day when I can meet him.
Also, I did not miss the point you made about the Royal Society. All I said was the Society (today) is not a great supporter of open access.
Best wishes.
Arun
----- Original Message ----- From: "Taran Rampersad" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2005 8:36 AM
Subject: Re: [DDN] On the need to adopt open access
Subbiah Arunachalam wrote:
In most cases the sponsors are the taxpayers. Much of the world'research is funded by governments. It is only legitimate to expect that publicly funded research should be availble to the public for free. And sponsors such as the Wellcome Trust are great champions of open access, particularly open access archiving.
Actually, that's arguable. Consider biogenetically engineered food - that research is done by corporations in the West - and is copyrighted, patented and even trademarked so that it can't get to the people who need it the most.
China, on the other hand, does the same research in it's Universities.
I'm pretty sure a lot of research that we're talking about is funded by corporations.
Unfortunately the Royal Society (today) is not a great supporter of open access as determined by the Berlin Declaration.
You missed the point. The Sprat quote was to point you to the fact that upon inception, that was the idea. Why that changed is worth exploration - I'm sure when you research it, you'll see it was about funding.
For more about OA, please look up Peter Suber's blog.
The idea of Open Access doesn't belong to Peter Suber. Or I would hope not. Unless there's some formalization which incorporates a lot of pre-existing works. :-)
But since I am hanging out of a window for bandwidth, perhaps you will answer something for me: What do you see as the difference between Open Access and Public Domain?
I could read what Peter Suber says, but you and I are having the discussion. He can hop in any time. :-) As it is, I'm writing something similar for next weeks entry on the Morph blog, where I am guest blogging. It should be up on Tuesday: http://mediacenter.blogs.com/morph/
I'm actually working on the funding issues.... should be interesting. I'm not done thinking it through yet, but if there are specific things that you think are interesting, please send me the links offlist (for private) or onlist to share. The latter is more in the spirit of Open Access. :-)
-- Taran Rampersad
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.linuxgazette.com http://www.a42.com http://www.knowprose.com http://www.easylum.net
"Criticize by creating." — Michelangelo
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