This is going to be a short post/vent about the recent rash of Open Access Policies brought forth by leading Universities. Harvard was one of the first Universities to declare support for an Open Access Policy. Press releases followed, such as this one here and the more sensational one about the MIT policy here. In fact, these policies cause a lot of confusion.

If we dig deeper, we find the details behind the policy in an unusually long and boring article. Let me save you the trouble of reading through the whole thing as it was painful enough for me. The skinny is that Harvard holds brown-bag lunches during which they tell you about how to comply with the NIH public access policy. I know that I’m going to go real soon because it sounds thrilling. Case in point: even Hal Abelson, who is NOT technically challenged as an MIT CS professor and the biggest proponent of the Open Access, has nothing of note in the MIT OA (DSpace) repository as of the time of writing this blog.

Herein lies the duality between Policy and Practice: talking about it and doing it. People used to tease me with the infamous phrase, “Those who can’t do, teach”. This is a perfect example. Instead of empowering people by giving them tools, policy wonks describe in excruciating detail the vagaries of negotiating copyright licenses and NIH compliance memos. The result is that while all this is talked and written about, nothing gets accomplished.

Now imagine that instead of writing Napster, Shawn Fanning held informational meetings on how to take floppy disks and send them to your friends via snail mail. In those meetings, Fanning would also point out that before sending the disk, music fans should send an informational memo to the copyright owner informing them that they wish to renegotiate their agreements. Revolutions (the good kind) are not started by simply telling people what they already know. Change can be achieved only by empowering millions to do what they otherwise would not be able or willing to do.

Like any good but too-quickly-popularized idea, Open Access can easily fall prey to opportunistic politicians who get up on the soapbox thinking that this will increase their popularity. Let’s consider for a second that memorandas and meetings will convince scientists to submit their work to the Provost’s office. What are the long-term consequences of this? What is the incentive for the University, or the Provost? Is this really the “right” way to publish? Is this the way to promote and distribute science? In the same Bloomberg article, Harold Varmus, who was one of the founding fathers of the OA movement and one of its biggest proponents, cautions that peer review and details in execution are both important in scientific publishing and science as a whole. I have to side with my man Harold here.

It’s easy to vote; it’s much harder to really consider the consequences of your vote; and it may be harder still to live with those consequences. Open Access is an idea that may turn into a movement, but it is still only an idea. Until then, it is easy to distort and end up with the opposite result. Scientists should consider carefully whether they may be sawing with reckless abandon the limb on which they’re so precariously perched.