SFScope.com is a great source for daily news about the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. Think of SFScope as the online trade journal of the speculative fiction fields.

SFScope.com is a great source for daily news about the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. Think of SFScope as the online trade journal of the speculative fiction fields.

In this paper, Armbruster argues that, while scholarly society publishers are worrying about the possible impact of postprint self-archiving, developments in e-Science (what we call eResearch) are likely to have an even greater impact on the whole system of scholarly communication. Semantic web technologies are predicated on open access to content. Knowledge-based societies thrive on commercial re-use of research. Therefore, the results of research must be made available on a non-exclusive basis. He suggests that society publishers should forget about 'content holding' as a business model and switch to charging for 'certification'' services (eg peer review). He makes the point that society publishers are "mission oriented" (rather than profit oriented) and that the mission is the widest dissemination of knowledge to their community. Therefore,they are defaulting on their mission by locking up content.

Alma is commenting on the media release by PRISM, (the publisher lobby goup0 in which they attacked open access mandates as being akin to censorship and open access journals as "junk science". Useful and sound counter-arguments to the PRISM perspective.