Communications of the ACM
Scholars Debate How to Improve Open Access
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Roger Schonfeld, director of libraries, scholarly communication, and museums for Ithaka S+R, has long grappled with questions about how open access to scholarship is unleashing both positive and negative effects in society.
In a Scholarly Kitchen piece published last week, Schonfeld says that misinformation, politicization, and other problems embedded in the open-access movement stem from a "mismatch" between the incentives in science and the ways in which "openness and politicization are bringing science into the public discourse."
Schonfeld has seen a lot of tension and debate over the economics of publishing, without commensurate attention paid to how to better police fraud and prevent misinformation.
Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science and a professor at the University of Virginia, notes that the open movement in science has placed a lot of emphasis on the end of the research process — results.
"Publishing is the currency of advancement," Nosek says. "I, as a researcher, have a conflict of interest in what's good for me in terms of career advancement and what's good for science. . . The reward system is about beauty and novelty, and that's distinct from the reality of everyday research, which is messy and has lots of false starts."
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