I know I’m a little late to the game, but open access is important year-round, and I only just recently got the chance to write these up. Below are my pledges to open access, which can also be found on the navigation tab above.
The system of pay-to-subscribe journals that spent so many centuries helping the scholarly landscape coordinate and collaborate is now obsolete; a vestigial organ in the body of science.
These days, most universities offer free web access and web hosting. These two elements are necessary, though not sufficient, for a free knowledge economy. We also need peer review (or some other, better form of quality control), improved reputation management (citations++), and some assurance that data/information will last. These come at a cost, but those costs can be paid by the entire scholarly market, and the fruits enjoyed within and without.
If you think open access is important, you should also consider pledging to support open access. Publishing companies have a lot of money invested in keeping things as they are, and only a concerted effort on behalf of the scholars feeding and using the system will be able to change it.
Scholarship is no longer local, and it’s about time our distribution system followed suit.
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I pledge to be a good scholarly citizen. This includes:
- Opening all data generated by me for the purpose of a publication at the time of publication. 1
- Opening all code generated by me for the purpose of a publication at the time of publication.
- Freely distributing all published material for which I have the right, and fighting to retain those rights in situations where that is not the case.
- Fighting for open access of all materials worked on as a co-author, participant in a grant, or consultant on a project.
- Only reviewing for journals which plan to release their publications openly.
- Donating to free open source software initiatives where I would otherwise have paid for proprietary software.
- Citing open publications if there is a choice between two otherwise equivalent sources.
Notes:
- unless there are human subjects and privacy concerns ↩
It’s a really good pledge! Is data in your field typically publicly available, or is it out of the ordinary to share data and code freely?
I should be braver about this. In my own work with my advisor, we’re all open-code and open-data, all the time. With the Complex Systems folks I’ve been working with, the code isn’t public and I think we’re not allowed to redistribute the data: we pull a large fraction of the traffic from Twitter, as it happens. And I don’t know how much I’d be comfortable demanding, on future papers with them, that they only be in open-access places…
Thanks! Unfortunately data in the humanities is traditionally not free, although thankfully there has been a recent push to change things.
While I will push for open access of all materials, I certainly don’t plan on being mean about it; I think you can work on them opening their data (except where there are privacy concerns) without alienating them. Also, I tentatively support limited embargoes, where you have the dataset for up to a year before releasing it. It’s not the ideal solution, but it’ll protect people who think their biggest advantage is the fact that they have data that other people don’t.