Yesterday a colleague informed me about Annotum, a new Word Press theme that facilitates open access publishing. A great deal of technical expertise by people at Google, PLoS and NLM (among others) went into its development. Learning about Annotum reminded me of my experience with Open Journal Systems several years ago. Now you don't need a whole platform to make open access happen, you just need a WordPress extension.
This is all to the good. But we can build as many tools as we want to facilitate open access and not actually get there. Building software is hard, but it's much easier than changing the culture of publish-or-perish tenure. That's about changing people's minds, not spiffy technology. This is where we need to focus, no matter how slow the journey may seem.
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