[Foundation-l] FYI: Wikipedia, Open Access and Cognitive Virology

[David Goodman]

Some background:

When I was a librarian open access was one of the principal things I
worked on. Stevan has been for over 10 years an acknowledged leaders
in this field, and his propaganda for open access has been a key
factor for the considerable success it has had--by now all major US
and UK granting agencies now require it or are about to do so. All of
us who use academic material are very much indebted to him, for I do
not think it would have happened to anywhere near this extent without
him.

But Stevan is very much set on his own preferred way of doing this.
His way is good, but he thinks   that only  his way is good--to the
extent that   he has often tried to argue against other ways, even
they they differ only in detail, and most of his activism in the last
few years has been against other open access advocates. (I am, as you
 gather, one of the people who thinks other ways are at least as good
or possibly better, and I have had many public & private discussions
about this with him over the years, not all of them friendly. ).

There are two basic methods:

One is known as "Gold" open access, publishing by open access
publishers in journals that are free to the reader, the costs being
paid through  some form of direct or indirect subsidy from the author,
his institution, his granting agency, or other financing arrangement.
(Familar examples of this are PLOS or BMC).

The other  is known as "Green" open access, publishing in journals in
the conventional way, but also putting the articles, or at least
unedited drafts of the manuscript ,into a repository. There are two
types: using a centralized repository , either on a nationwide or
subject-wide basis (the familiar examples of which are PubMed Central
in biomedicine and arXiv in physics), or alternatively on an
institution-wide basis (good examples are Harvard's DASH or Stevan's
own repository at Southampton, ECS )

The only form Stevan supports is institutional repositories.  (for
reasons, I refer you to his many long postings on  American Scientist
Open Access Forum , which he moderates in accord with his own views.)
He opposes the term open access publishing because it suggests "Gold"
Open Access publishers.

When I joined WP three years ago, I found that   Stevan was exercising
OWNership over the WP article on open access, which almost totally
focussed on institutional-based repositories and referenced a great
number of his own writings.  When I and other made changes, Stevan
always reverted them.

Stevan  attempted to get his form of the article fixed by personal
intervention with an eminent open access supporter very close to his
own views who was a member of the WMF Advisory Board, and I believe
also with Jimbo.  I am also a professional acquaintance of that
supporter, an extraordinarily fair-minded person trusted by everyone
dealing with the subject at all, and between us in personal discussion
with Stevan we were able to convince Stevan to let community processes
deal with the article.

As phoebe says, the current wording is reasonable.

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG