Open Access

What Hacker News says

1. p4bl0Jun 2014
   Peter Suber's book on Open Access is really great, but I think it lacks perspectives on the use of the Open Access movement to fight bibliometrics. If you speak French I recently wrote a detailed introduction to the Open Access movement which points out the relationship between the two movements and how Open Access can help to go in the right direction wrt fighting bibliometrics. It available at http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html.
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2. abetuskOct 2021
   > This series offers accessible, concise, beautifully produced books on topics of current interest. Leading thinkers write the books in this series, and experts deliver overviews of subjects that range from the cultural and the historical to the scientific and the technical.

   ...

   "Open Access" ($7.47) https://www.amazon.com/Open-Access-Press-Essential-Knowledge...

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3. paultopiaMay 2020
   There are a number of claims that this happens in the academic market as well.

   Sources:

   1. Peter Suber's Open Access monograph, chapter 5, p. 107-110 (itself open access, of course). https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Open_Access_(the_book) argues that OA books facilitate "searching and sampling," and then people want to read the whole thing in the nicer print format.

   2. University of Michigan Press says it happens sometimes thanks to increased "awareness and visibility": https://www.press.umich.edu/openaccess

   3. A phd thesis reviewing studies, and finding a negative relationship between OA and sales: https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/68465

   4. A swiss study of matched pairs of books, one OA, one traditional; no statistically significant difference in sales http://www.snf.ch/SiteCollectionDocuments/OAPEN-CH_schlussbe...

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4. lookatieeeJul 2016
   Aaron Swartz was working on a book before he committed suicide in 2013. The draft was later published under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA-NC) license. It can downloaded for free from tons of sites on the Internet.

   IEEE is making people $30 for a copy of it.

   Check it out: http://goo.gl/1EwdLn

   (click that big yellow Full Text button to see the price).

   Aaron was vehemently against sites like IEEE, Elsevier, and JSTOR. Putting aside for a moment the ethical and moral questions, can a company choose to sell something that's licensed under CC or some other permissive license?

   And if so, where does that money go? And IEEE, at least for IEEE membership, is a nonprofit. Is this legal?

   I checked it out and there are other examples where they are charging for content that the authors released for free:

   Engineering a Safer World:Systems Thinking Applied to Safety written by Nancy Leveson

   From MIT Press: https://goo.gl/L05G3K

   From IEEE: http://goo.gl/UJnv9L

   They split that book into 25 individual chapters, each one costing $15, for a grand total of $375. And it's an extra $15 if you want the book cover/table of contents! http://goo.gl/QVmRvU)

   Open Access by Peter Suber

   From MIT Press https://goo.gl/yF0kB8

   From IEEE http://goo.gl/N01xF2

   That's the same as the other book, split into chapters and sold for $15 each.

   There is no way an individual would fall for this. But libraries and universities may not be checking. I have seen tons of posts about publishers taking advantage of institutions. Is this another example to slip one past the librarian?

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