Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Stop what you’re doing and go read Cameron Neylon’s blog. Specifically, read his new post, Improving on “Access to Research”.

Regular readers of SV-POW! might legitimately complain that my so-called advocacy consists mostly of whining about how rubbish things are. If you find that wearying (and I won’t blame you if you do), then read Cameron instead: he goes beyond critiquing what is, and sees what could be. Here is a key quote on this new post:

I did this on a rainy Saturday afternoon because I could, because it helped me learn a few things, and because it was fun. I’m one of tens or hundreds of thousands who could have done this, who might apply those skills to cleaning up the geocoding of species in research articles, or extracting chemical names, or phylogenetic trees, or finding new ways to understand the networks of influence in the research literature. I’m not going to ask for permission, I’m not going to go out of my way to get access, and I’m not going to build something I’m not allowed to share. A few dedicated individuals will tackle the permissions issues and the politics. The rest will just move on to the next interesting, and more accessible, puzzle.

Right! Open access is not about reducing subscription costs to libraries, or about  slicing away the absurd profits of the legacy publishers, or about a change to business models. It’s about doing new and exciting things that simply weren’t possible before.