I am sure Elsevier, Wiley, Springer and the like are having great fun seeing membres of the Open Access community rip each other apart: 1) those who have always tried to promote a healthy and moral alternative to what has become of the scholarly publication process in the 4 or 5 last decades; 2) those who are suspecting group (1) of trying to operate strange and secret maneuvers in ordre to take who-knows-which powers and to rule the world of research communication... Not just funny. Sad.
As a member of group (1), I must admit that I don't see what kind of personal benefit I, or any of us could seek by defending the cause of OA. To me, there is on l'y one giant potentially collective benefit : a more efficient, more fluid transmission of knowledge, free of charge and accessible for all and everywhere on the planet. Jumping at each others' throats is taking both our attention and energy away from the real combat, which must be focused on the mechanisms installed [indeed - with the agreement of many of our colleagues (I wouldn't say complicity, it is a false interpretation)] and organised in such a way that they generate enormous and nowadays disproportionate amounts of money at the expense of research funds. Please, let's come back to our senses and let's unite. If we want to convince researchers, reviewers, finders, academic leaders and staff, etc. to develop new paradigms of knowledge transmission, sharing and interaction, let's work at it ! And please, let's gather and make public as many facts as possible. A an example, see data and graph on my blog : https://bernardrentier.wordpress.com/2015/12/31/denouncing-the-imposter-factor/ Data like these are needed to give corpus to our arguments. On this, I wish you all an excellent 2016, which can only be better than 2015...
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