Open Source Communism: Open Source CommunismI don't participate much in the OA Debate, largely because I see the outcome as a foregone conclusion. What we are seeing now is the reaction of publishers with an established business model (read license to print money) being threatened by change. Given that OA will not be going away, in my opinion what publishers should be doing is thinking creatively and developing new business models for scientific publishing. Update: It gets better according to Cognitive Daily, apparently the the images used on the PRISM website were in violation of copyright law. Blog around the clock has the definitive roundup post for more reactions.
Of course there is always the option of being ridiculously reactionary, resulting in unintentional hilarity: PRISM - Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine. I picked this up via Jonathan Eisen's blog, who I think captures the tone of the site with this comment: this McCarthy like tone of PRISM - basically equating openness with evil and godlessness is ridiculous..
This made me think of the anti-comunist/open-source propaganda poster that's been doing the rounds of the net: If you program open source, you're programming COMMUNISM (see included image). If anyone has Photoshop/GIMP skills, please modify the image to read "If you publish in OA journals, you're publishing COMMUNISM! - A reminder from your friends at PRISM. More inspiration here
Comments
Unintentional hilarity
I've had that poster above my desk for years (in fact I think you alerted me to it about 6 or 7 years ago).
Unintentional hilarity is right. The swift, incisive comment by the OA community has labelled this group as clowns from day one. They're doomed to ridicule and disdain until they take down their site.
Thank God
It is "only" in America so far.
Open Access?
It seems we're not quite there yet, even with the Open Access journals. See This post from Peter Murray-Rust on "Open" Access.