Second thoughts on Gowers’ “Why I’ve joined the bad guys”
This post, coming after the “Quick reaction…“, is the second dedicated to the post “Why I’ve joined the bad guys” by Tim Gowers.
Let’s calm down a bit. I could discuss at length about the multiple reasons why the arguments from the mentioned post are wrong, or twisted, or otherwise. Maybe for another time, but for now it is enough to say that it looks like a piece of not well designed PR for gold open access. PR is a profession by itself, it has its techniques and means to achieve the goal, but here the stellar mathematician Gowers just shows that PR is not among his strengths.
It is clear that the crux of the matter is dissapointment. Gowers, who was the initiator of the cost of knowledge movement, of the polymath project, is now trying to sell us the gold open access?
Maybe it means that there is a need for public figures to support this shaky construction.
At second thought, the FoM is not the end of the world as we knew it. Is just yet another journal which tries to salvage what it can from the old publication model, who was once essential for the research community, but is now obsolete because the net is here.
The real matter is though not FoM, or Gowers “betrayal”, but the fact that we have to look for new models of publication. Once such a model is found then naturally any FoM will decay to oblivion.
Take for example the business of publication of encyclopedias. Enters Wikipedia, who proved it is scalable and it is sustained by millions of enthusiasts, btw, and now the encyclopedias business is no longer viable. It will happen the same with the publication of research articles.
Better is to try to think about a good model. Consider for example two related ideas, discussed here:
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Please let’s not call it the ‘gold’ model, or if you do, please put it in quotes. This term is just more PR, and the only ‘gold’ involved is in the pockets of the publishers.
Do you know, is there an organisation a bit like costofknowledge where people can pledge not to pay publication charges?
In the wiki page about open access it is called Gold OA. Otherwise, I don’t know about any such organization, but I am obviously interested to learn about one.
It is probably a safe prediction that Gold OA will be embraced at the political level. One has to squeeze money from somebody, if you cannot do this from the readers, then only the authors are left. I hope this will not happen, but that is the direction which seems more and more probable. It goes along the minimal effort slope (from the publishers part). Mind you, they are not bad in principle or on purpose, but when politics, lobbies and the exercise of authority enter the stage, then morality and other details like that are trashed, even if everybody agrees that in the future, eventually, a new model of publication will be used. But not right now, later, please, that is their point. Meanwhile, it is still OK to publish for vanity, for the demands of HR departments, like if almost everybody forgot why they have chosen to do research instead of just making money (for example). Say to a kid that research means to write lots of mediocre articles, sliced in as many parts as possible, and that nobody will read those articles, only the number of them is important. Wow!!! that will put stars in the kid’s eye.