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ASTRONOMICAL PUBLISHING 21
universities to push hard for open access for the reasons noted earlier. And
open access has great educational benefits as well as benefits for basic research.
(A disclaimer: I work for Harvard University which now has a strong
internal open access policy aimed at providing free use for non-profit purposes
– education and research – to content produced by university staff
and faculty). And the government has entered the debate by asking for comments
on proposed regulations regarding access to content produced with
Federal resources. Most people tend to forget that US Federal Employee
and certain state employees are already “exempt” from copyright, i.e. their
work cannot be copyrighted so by definition is freely available. This has not,
as I can again tell you from personal experience as a Smithsonian employee
and civil servant, hindered the ability of Feds to publish.
Congress, the Executive Branch and the Judiciary have been of two
minds on this issue. On one hand they want to protect intellectual property
rights (patents, copyrights) to provide proprietary use of material for gain
and competitive advantage – its good for industry and individuals. On the
other hand, they believe that there should be free access to information paid
for by the taxpayer – which will also lead to economic gain and competitive
advantage. It is quite possible in any compromise that we could get the
worst of both worlds. Fortunately the problem is now under study and
most (but not all) of the parties involved have gotten together to examine
solutions to the open access question that will provide such access without
destroying the economic basis for refereed scholarly publishing (see the
report of the AAU Roundtable on Scholarly Publishing for a review of the
problem and a list of recommendations, AAU 2010).
5. The Future (The Tomorrowland of Publishing)
So where do we go from here? And better, how can we prepare for the
future? There are only a few drivers: New ways of Communicating, Changes
in the Way We Work, Changes in the World, and lastly Changes in the
Resources Available. Perhaps there will also be legal or legislative issues,
but I cannot predict even in the short term what those might be. The others
we understand and can plan to address them.
First we should remember 1. Why are we publishing? And 2. Who are
the users? If we keep the answers to those questions in mind, we can have
a much clearer view of what we need to do.
Next, we can predict, based on recent past performance, important
trends.
1. There will be an increasing move towards open access and very rapid
publication. “Tenure” based on only refereed publications is becoming
less important, especially as more astronomers are employed outside