Why bother with Open Scholarship? ::

One or two of the posts in the recent flurry on Open Biblical Studies have asked questions that aggregate in my mind into the caricature: Why bother with "open scholarship"? After all we all have access anyway...

I've started writing several angry posts that point out that not everyone lives a life of rich abundance, with University libraries at hand and the like, but they all got to bitter and twisted...

Now, a guy called Hannu, from a blog called Tomorrow Elephant (I wonder why?) has answered neatly and without appeal to the Two-thirds World.

He starts:

Last week, I tried to access a paper which I cowrote with a bunch of fine people a few years back, only to discover that I couldn’t, since Edinburgh University does not have a subscription to the publication in which it appeared. This made me seriously angry, and so I started thinking about all the things that are wrong with the current scientific publishing model.

Well I can see how that would hurt, suppose you wrote for the Bulletin of Highly Relevant Paleographic Studies. The journal's electronic editions are subscription only, and your library, though richly endowed, does not subscribe... (Well no library can subscribe to everything ;) Well if I was you, and I had lost my own electronic copy, or wanted a page reference, I'd be pissed off too!

What we need is open scholarship...

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Filed in: open.biblical.studies open.scholarship

¶ 7:32 AM [to Del.icio.us]

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