This week I'm in Philadelphia for the EDUCAUSE conference, and am very much looking forward to Seth Godin's keynote tomorrow morning. It will be a great meeting.
Just before wandering the exhibit hall today I caught up with Scott's post about the economics of open access. Scott's main point is incontestable--that some OA publishers are also doing well financially, so where's the librarian outrage? Shouldn't we be consistent? Yes, we should.
That said, I don't hear that much outrage against traditional publishers these days either. We have entered a more quiet, measured phase in the open access debate. The revolutionary fervor has abated.
That's a good thing. Open access is a conservative proposition--you're making PDFs available for free to all, but they are still PDFs that hearken back to the print-only era. How tame this revolution is.
So let's get beyond the PDF already. It's time to figure out how to use the Web to create, nurture and preserve new types of research. Why stress so much about "papers" in the digital age?
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