Last week, Martin interviewed me about my new job at F1000. Rather gratifyingly, not least because I know certain people were watching developments with interest, Richard Akerman (a technology architect and information security officer; whereas I’m an information architect but not, unfortunately, a technology security officer) kicked off a storming discussion over at FriendFeed.
Some very interesting points are made, and I’ll try to keep an eye on the discussion at Friendfeed (much to certain other people’s disgust) and attempt to field the slings and arrows of outraged OA-ers.
[mouses over “other”] Whatever. I kind of left a comment, even. I just get tired of the type of discussions, for example in that thread, where everything just automatically has to be free because some other things are free.
Also, I’m pissed off that it had to take F1000 hiring you, and Martin interviewing you, to suddenly get people interested in a site that has existed for years and that is actually being used by people who have never even heard of blogs or Twitter or RSS and are not as “cool” as the FF gang. My PhD supervisor and my tech-challenged coworker know what F1000 is, but I’ve had to help both of them with the simplest computer tasks and they’ve never used RSS or seen a blog. So who do you want to reach? Thousands of working scientists or ten screaming web geeks?
Yeah.
So.
That’s why I try not to read those threads.
Without digging down into the thread in question, I am of two minds regarding OA. One one side I currently have no access to non-OA publications (secondary education schools seldom subscribe to expensive journals), while at the same time having a need — and desire — to stay roughtly current with what’s happening, in a broad set of fields. And I suspect teachers in less wealthy countries than Sweden have even less chance of getting hold of something from Naure or Science. On the other hand the OA or not issue is moot to the primary intended audience for the publications I read, and it is their work, their data, their list of papers on their CV and their grant applications.
Thanks for the link but “kicked off” the discussion is a bit generous, I just posted the link and the discussion started all by itself. I do agree with Eva that the “everything must be free on the web” discussion wears a bit thin. It’s not unreasonable to expect people to pay for added value.
The discussion over at FriendFeed contains some interesting material for thought, and I’m sure Richard will come up with some clever strategies to make F1000 both more exciting and revenue-generating.
Eva, I agree with what you say, but I still very much like FriendFeed because of the way the service is working. I would very much like it if Nature Network would use a similar concept.