I've noticed that the current discussion of Open Access has produced, on my site, a high ratio of comments to visitors. There are very few people actually reading these posts (relatively speaking) but lots of talking.
Passionate positions among few people.
I would like to take this moment to point out a few new items on the intertubes regarding this issue.
This item is to be found at the blog called The Scholarly Kitchen. This is a blog of the "Society for Scholarly Publishing" ... which is presumably a trade organization supporting the evil, pirate-like publishers. The piece makes a couple of absurd points and one major, major mistake. I have visited the blog and corrected it. They may not like it.
Over at Nature Network, John Wilbanks' blog has this item: On the PLoS / Nature business model story... I like it. Nice work.
DrugMonkey says "oop oop ooop woooawawaaooo oop ooop" which translates as On making the publishing process "more rapid, rational and equitable". Related topic.
Finally, while we are on the topic of Open Access publishing, please go over to A Blog Around the Clock and have a look at what is New and Exciting in PLoS
You know, it occurs to me that one reason that few readers are spending much time on this topic (besides the fact that it is potentially quite boring) is that everyone who is not an entrenched academic knows that Open Access is the only way to go, and is simply waiting for it to spread across the land.
Don't worry. It will.
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I thought a little more about what I find so objectionable about Nature denigrating papers published in what Nature calls low tier journals (which happen to be open access). A paper can only be evaluated on its own merit or lack of merit. A paper cannot be evaluated by looking at the journal it is published in, who the authors are, what grade of paper it is printed on, what institution the authors are from. Any purported "evaluation" of a paper based on conditions independent of the scientific content of the paper is a non-scientific distortion. The "evaluation" cannot be correct because it doesn't start using data that is appropriate. If a scientist made such an evaluation and said it was a "scientific" evaluation that would be scientific misconduct.
In other words, a scientific evaluation has to start with reliable data and use reliable reasoning to reach a reliable conclusion. Each step has to be reliable.