For those who want to catch up with debate on open access, Walt
Crawford provides an unusual, extensive and colourful tour of the open
access blogs over the last year or so, devoting all 34 pages (pdf) of
the latest issue of his own Cites and Insights newsletter (V9N12, Nov
2009)
http://citesandinsights.info/civ9i12.pdf
Crawford concludes: "Is this a coherent overview of OA, or OA between
mid-2008 and now? Absolutely not." This may be for two reasons. First
it may be the nature of open access and its participants. Or it might
be because Crawford continually punctuates his article by sniping at
Stevan Harnad - nothing new there, then - a major figure in the field,
as Crawford effectively acknowledges, and one of the few with a
coherent approach to OA. It's possible to disagree with Harnad, as
with anyone else on this topic, but what Crawford shows here is that
by failing to examine Harnad's ideas and proposals there is less
likely to be a coherent and satisfactory outcome for open access soon.
Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
Received on Tue Oct 06 2009 - 13:17:55 BST