And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire
movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they
attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.
Although the substance of the above quote is usually attributed to
Gandhi, there’s no record that he actually said it. The quote above is
by
Nicholas
Klein, a labor activist, from 1918.
I don’t include it as an example of attribution decay. I use it as a
frame for where we are in the open access world right now.
We’ve had a good run. We got the NIH public access mandate. We got the
petition to 25,000 signatures. We got the presidential directive
extending the NIH policy across the entire federal government. We got
multiple examples of open access publishers into sustainable revenue
models.
But changing the default from closed to open was always going to involve
a phase where those whose revenue models depend on closed really brought
the guns out against us. And we’re there now.
There’s Wiley, wallowing in the mud
and
smearing Public Library of Science’s peer review credentials under the
charade of a survey of authors.
There’s Elsevier,
proposing
a novel license for STM publishers and somehow magically being part of
a Netaction “bad legislation” coalition that attacks all open access
bills, while denying any knowledge of it (no story coverage, but some
conversations on Alicia Wise’s
twitter feed). (UPDATE May 24 2013: Times Higher Education UK
has
a story in which Elsevier sort of distances themselves from Netaction)
There’s crocodile tears
covering
the emergence of scammy open access journals, none of which mentions
the long-time existence of scammy closed access journals. This is not
surprising, as so many of the large, “authoritative and important”
publishers make money by publishing scammy journals -
anyone
remember the Merck-Elsevier scammy bone journal? Still waiting to see
someone mention that in the same breath.
Then there’s the systemic disadvantage we have as advocates once
policies move into implementation phase. The meetings last week at the
National Academies are a great example of why it’s so hard to change the
system. I had to travel 3 of the 4 days for work, and the fourth day I
was in meetings all day that made it impossible for me to attend, or to
speak.
We have day jobs, us advocates. But the publishing industry we’re
fighting against has no other job. They can hire people who have only
the
responsibility of making sure the open policies are implemented in the
least open way. They can saturate every meeting in DC with hired guns,
and claim it as evidence that the public supports them.
But it’s not about being depressed, or complaining. It’s a sign that
we’re finally getting close to the bone. We’re enough of a threat not to
be ignored, or ridiculed. We’re gonna get hit, and we’re gonna get hit
hard.
We have to keep reminding the world that this isn’t about protecting a
dinosaur business model, this fight. It’s not about scammy journals,
which exist no matter how they get paid for. It’s not about who has the
most lobbying money in DC. It’s not about new licenses, or sleazy survey
language.
It’s about letting entrepreneurs build
businesses on top of open content. It’s about
kids building cancer
tests on open content. It’s about
you
and me being able to read what our tax dollars paid for. Don’t let the
FUD and mudslinging get in the way of that message, ever.
We have to keep getting up. We have to keep fighting back. Because in
the end, we’re on the right side of history. And once we get through
this phase we get to the good part, where they build a monument to
Heather Joseph and Peter Suber and Mike Eisen and all the heroes of open
access.