The Accelerating Open Access Revolution
It is only a couple of days since I last wrote something on the revolution in open access to information, but here are two new things that I need to share with you.
First, today saw the launch of the journal Open Medicine.
These are a couple of extracts from James Maskalyk’s editorial in the inaugural issue:
…To attain their true worth, medical journals need to place the knowledge on their pages into as many capable hands as possible. In the past, this opportunity was limited mainly to those with a university library close by. Now, because of the Internet, one simply needs to be near a telephone line. The capacity of medical journals to disseminate knowledge has never been greater…
Unfortunately, physicians attempting to answer a clinical question are faced with two unappealing options: to navigate a sea of unedited pages of varying quality, or to pay for access to more carefully reviewed scholarly information. It seems an anathema to the spirit of medical research that, largely for economic reasons, the information it produces remains hidden from many potential users. Access is limited not only for health professionals in poorer countries, but also for health care providers in wealthy countries (most of whom do not have "free" access to information unless they work in universities), and for patients, who deserve the opportunity to become informed about research that affects their lives. The transformation of research findings and discussion of the results — the application of knowledge — is curtailed. Just as importantly, the debate over its merit is stifled before it can properly begin….
Medical knowledge should be public and free from undeclared influence. When possible, it should be free for those who apply it. Since people’s lives depend on it, that knowledge must be filtered several times before it is ready to use. Studies need to be peer reviewed, to have their statistics analyzed, their content edited, then copy edited, then published quickly for as wide an audience as possible. The prospect of having a high-quality source of information that held true to these principles but was also free and globally accessible was impossible to imagine 20 years ago….
The second thing is something very helpful on Peter Suber’s excellent blog:
OA podcasts from non-OA journals
Charles W. Bailey Jr. has collected some links for journals offering OA podcasts.
In
a recent SSP-L message, Mark Johnson, Journal Manager of HighWire
Press, identified three journals that offer podcasts or digital audio
files:Here are a few others:
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