Based on a debate that was held at the Society for Scholarly Publishing on Open Access. August 2004. Also found in Nature Forum.
Snow White was working around the cottage one day when she got word of a terrible cave-in at the mine of the seven dwarves. She frantically rushed to the mine, peered down the dust-filled shaft, and called out: ‘Hello there, are you all right?’
A distant voice came back: ‘I believe the politicians when they say we can solve our healthcare problems, fix Social Security, increase defense spending, pay down the debt, balance the budget, and still cut our taxes’. Snow White looked up.
‘Whew!’ she said… ‘at least Dopey is alive’.
We hear a lot about Open Access (OA) these days at publishing conferences, in scholarly magazines and even in the popular press. Advocates have tried to shape the debate as merely a call for experimentation, claiming they are only promoting a new business model: OA, they say, can be achieved by a simple shift of costs from subscribers to authors; OA is another model for paying the costs of publishing; OA is so obviously good for scholars that surely no-one can object.
The debate, however, is neither about experiments nor about business models. This debate is about single-minded beliefs—an orthodoxy that is promoted with religious fervour. A few quotes illustrate that fervour: MORE
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