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The sense of entitlement that people get when tax dollars are even remotely involved is astonishing. While I agree with the idea of open-access journals, I find
by tensor 15y ago
The sense of entitlement that people get when tax dollars are even remotely involved is astonishing. While I agree with the idea of open-access journals, I find this vigilantism crude and a bit naive.
If you think about it, the people also pay the salaries of corporate employees. You buy the product, it's your dollar at work. Yet nobody has the same sense of I paid you thus I deserve all your ip and time that they do when tax dollars are at work. I suppose it must have something to do with having a choice to pay: with taxes, you have none.
I can't shake the feeling that all of this has much less to do with people wanting to learn and much more to do with people wanting to take it to the man.
- nooneelse 15y ago> I can't shake the feeling that all of this has much less to do with people wanting to learn and much more to do with people wanting to take it to the man. I think it might be people with genuine idealism about the virtues of openness trying to find a way to go in that direction and hoping to yoke the sense of entitlement other people have in order that it will do some rhetorical work for them. If you find the one distasteful, then those seeking to use it as a tool might lose some respect for doing so. Personally I think the important issue for more openness isn't finding such rhetoric to motivate it. It is finding and promoting solutions to the review process and filtering/ranking-by-quality of papers in more fields. If the best minds in a field don't have any other incentive toward contributing to that process than the journal system, then I still need to go through the maw of the journals (or tell the library I use to do so) when I need to learn about the field using the benefit of the understanding in those minds.