On 21-Oct-09, at 9:56 PM, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote:

> OA is *not* what his essay is primarily about.
> He did post his piece "in honor of" Open Access Week...
> but his focus in the essay is on  the commercial/not-for-profit
> contrast rather than the open access/closed access continuum."
>
> Surely being interested in Open Access does not require a zero- 
> tolerance
> policy for interest in other topics and goals?

After all these years of endless misunderstandings about OA and how to  
reach it (prominent among them being to keep focusing on the product  
price/profit problem instead of  the research access problem) -- and  
the resulting endless delays in reaching for the universal OA that is  
and has been fully within our grasp all along -- I think zero- 
tolerance for topics and goals that have already held OA back so long  
is probably a fair descriptor of the motivation behind my critique of  
the advice to boycott "for-profit" publishers "in honor of" OA week.

Jason's response, by the way, is a lot milder than that of the third  
parties who seem to be taking personal umbrage at my critique of the  
publisher boycott strategy: http://jasonbairdjackson.com/2009/10/12/getting-yourself-out-of-the-business-in-five-easy-steps/

In the blog version of my posting I had added:

(P.S. The correlation between whether a journal is published by a for- 
profit publisher and whether it is an OA journal is at best a weak  
one. The American Chemical Society is one of the most regressive of  
journal publishers, and it is not-for-profit. Springer and Hindawi are  
both OA publishers and for-profit. But in any case, neither the  
problem nor the solution resides in publishers, for-profit or not.  
Both the problem and the solution is entirely in the hands of the  
research community, the providers of all research content, and it  
resides at the ends of their fingertips.)

The way for researchers to get the publisher profit motive out of the  
way of research access is to bypass it -- by providing free online  
access to their own published research (articles).

Stevan

PPS: "On books, I (and the OA movement) plead 'nolo contendere':  
Books, unlike refereed journal articles, are not exception-free author- 
give-ways, hence not candidates for OA deposit mandates either. It’s  
author choice, as it always was."