Wouter Gerritsma's blog, WoW! Wouter on the Web carries a YouTube video in which a number of senior scholarly figures from the Netherlands make statements about the virtues of Open Access. As Wouter says, it's a pretty boring video (spoken in Dutch with English sub-titles) but, from my point of view, the worst thing about it is the lack of vision in the statements. Here, OA is viewed simply as consisting of open archives (or repositories), and these are the kind of people who are actually involved in making decisions about the future of scholarly communication. Not a word about free, OA journals when, for a country the size of the Netherlands, creating a pool of such journals would be very much cheaper than funding repositories.
When are the so-called 'leaders' of the academic and research communities going to understand what is at stake here? To remain in the grasp of the commercial world, with ever-rising 'author charges' or denial of archiving rights, or to break free and begin to take advantage of what the technology now offers?
Hey, just want to say hi. I'm new here.
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