I am not sure the difference lies in the different viewpoints of editors and scholars on one side, and taxpayers on the other. Let us just say in terms of practices and empirical evidence, journals in various disciplines have their own choices to be made adopting free versus open access (though the choice is increasingly less binary these days). Then can we move on by respecting different alternatives to change and/or maintain status quo?

However, to me it is much an important differences in terms of institutions. You have university/research institutions who conduct research on one hand, and you have publishing institutions who provide indexing and accessing services on the other. And each of them could be public or private institutions, with different sets of revenues and goals. Not every interest of institutions are properly aligned like major university such as Oxford which have both major research institution and major publishing institution. Thus, it is possible for research/teaching institutions like Princeton (which has also good publishing institution) to make a conscious decision to adopt an open access policy as below:

While it is not a "pure" open access policy, it is a policy that highlight the interests of research/teaching institutions may not be aligned perfectly in every case. Perhaps in your own experience, the tensions (if not conflicts) of interests in teaching/researching on one hand and getting revenue/money to run a publishing work can be managed in your context, and the benefits to introduce open access outweight the disruptions and potential issues it may cause.

Here the nature of "public" institutions such as Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia communities may and should have another set of approaches in dealing with open access policies and push whatever they think is the best for them and for the eco-system of research and publishing.

Therefore, instead of taking a grand stance (almost to the ideological level) regarding for or against open access, I suggest that a practical (even to the mundane level of to-do laundry lists of pros versus cons) approach is better for institutions and communities to find the most appropriate solutions for them. Here, Dario as a researcher working for Wikimedia Foundation whose institution is defined legally largely with its signature open access license, has a mission of free knowledge for all, and has a user base which may lean a bit to open access concepts and practices, it is conceivable that he asks the members in this mailing list to sign up for the petition. It is difficult to argue that the petition is not in the overall interest of Wikimedia as an institution, Wikipedia as a free knowledge for all practice, and arguably most important of all, allowing non-university or poor-university researchers /wikipedians to improve articles.

So chill and relax. If you think Dario is really joining an opposing force that will change the academic and media environment as you know it for the worse, then it is a very big (and sort of US-based if not -centric) public policy debate to be have. But I am curious, can you lay out any reasons why Wikimedia or Wiki researchers should oppose this idea here in this mailing list, given the some of the obvious positions they have on open content licenses?

han-teng liao

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Richard Jensen <rjensen@uic.edu> wrote:

Sorry Dario, you need to look at it from the editors' and scholarls point of view and not say you are thinking of the "taxpayer"--journal prices have gone up but taxes have gone down, so that's not a real issue. I've been on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals & all would be in real trouble on free access. Who would pay their bills? Who would pay their grad students? Already they are threatened by declining university budgets and losing the subscription base would be a terrific blow. "Access for the "taxpayers" / "taxpayers pay twice" is a rhetorical tool designed to defund science. It is the professors and graduate students who need the journals and who would be hurt when they close.

Richard Jensen

At 11:45 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:

With all due respect, your statement is simply false and ill-informed. The NIH as well as a growing number of large research institutions and funding bodies worldwide has been mandating open access for 4 years and I'd like to see any evidence that this is "destroying peer review". There are many sustainable open access models that publishers and scholarly societies are adopting, the only thing this campaign is threatening is the taxpayer's obligation to pay twice for research they have already funded.

Best,
Dario

On May 20, 2012, at 10:30 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:

> that's a bad idea--it will destroy the financial base of thousands of journals and throw the whole science community into turmoil for years as the main quality control system --peer review--is destroyed.
>
> The alternative of direct government subsidy of journals is even more dangerous, as it will give politicians control over what gets published.
>
> Richard Jensen
>
> At 11:19 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
>> (apologies for cross-posting)
>>
>> A petition you should care about: require free access over the Internet to journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.
>>
>> http://access2research.org/
>> http://wh.gov/6TH
>>
>> 25,000 signatures in 30 days (by June 19) gets an official response from the White House.
>>
>> Dario
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wiki-research-l mailing list
>> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

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