[Abolitionists of the world
of the slavery of traditional publishing
U N I T E!!!!!!!!!!!!
--ZMMM ]
-------------------------------------------------
Time to End the Slavery of Traditional Publishing
Submitted by Gavin Yamey on Sun, 2007-02-18 07:13.
http://www.plos.org/cms/node/204
In a characteristically provocative talk last week, Richard Smith, who is
on the Board of Directors of PLoS, accused traditional subscription-based
publishers of acting like slave owners. And he compared open access
advocates to abolitionists.
Richard was speaking at the BioMed Central Open Access Colloquium,
alongside other "abolitionists," including my colleague Ginny Barbour,
Senior Editor at PLoS Medicine. The talks have all been archived on the
colloquium website.
In his slavery analogy, Richard recalled the famous George Yard meeting.
On 22nd May 1787, 12 men met in a printing shop at 2 George Yard in the
City of London determined to end slavery. At that time, said Richard, more
people were slaves than were free and the British economy depended on
slavery. Yet by March 1807 slave trading was abolished in the British
Empire.
Today's traditional publishers, he argued, are the slave traders. The
research articles and many of the academics who write them are the slaves.
"And the shock troops of open access~WPaul Ginsparg, Harold Varmus, Vitek
Tracz, Pat Brown, Mike Eisen, Stevan Harnad~Ware the abolitionists," he
said.
So when was the equivalent of the George Yard meeting in the biomedical
publishing world? Some of the crucial events, said Richard, were:
* 13 November 1990: Tim Berners Lee wrote the first web page
* 16 August 1991: Paul Ginsparg (who is also on the Board of Directors
of PLoS) launched a high energy physics preprint archive
* 27 June 1994: Stevan Harnad posted a ~Ssubversive proposal~T promoting
self-archiving
* 5 May 1999: Harold Varmus, Chair of the Board of Directors of PLoS,
proposed E-biomed
* Feb 2000: Pubmed Central was launched
* 14 February 2002: The Budapest Open Access Initiative was launched
* 1 October 2005: The Wellcome Trust implemented its open access
mandate
Richard is certainly not alone in taking a human rights-based approach to
the issue of restricted access to essential scientific and medical
information. I've been doing a little research on the rights-based angle
to restricted access, and I've been surprised at how many human rights
declarations call for free and open access to scientific and medical
information.
The United Nations, for example, has repeatedly championed the universal
right to access scientific knowledge. Indeed, the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, the the primary UN document articulating human rights
standards and norms, states that everyone has the right ~Sto share in
scientific advancement and its benefits~T (article 27, section 1).
In 1999, the World Conference on Science, organized by the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), adopted the
Declaration on Science and the Use of Scientific Knowledge. The
declaration emphasizes ~Sthe importance for scientific research and
education of full and open access to information and data belonging to the
public domain~T (article 3, section 38).
The declaration also notes that ~SEqual access to science is not only a
social and ethical requirement for human development, but also essential
for realizing the full potential of scientific communities worldwide and
for orienting scientific progress towards meeting the needs of humankind~T
(article 4, section 42).
As John Willinsky argues so convincingly in his brilliant book The Access
Principle (which is freely available online), the right to access
knowledge "has a claim on our humanity that stands with other basic
rights, whether to life, liberty, justice, or respect."
For the sake of global scientific progress, human development, and poverty
alleviation, it is surely time to end the slavery of traditional
publishing.
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---
Zapopan Martín Muela-Meza
Doctoral Candidate
University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
<http://zapopanmuela.googlepages.com/cv_english >
"Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."
--Albert Einstein (1949). "Why Socialism?" Monthly Review.
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einst.htm >
Source: Einstein, A. (2005). Ideas and opinions. London: A Condor Book; Souvenir Press (Educational and Academic), p. 157.
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Received on Thu Feb 21 2008 - 11:16:59 GMT