Closing Ranks

Talking of Microsoft, I see that my old chums at Reed Elsevier (disclosure: I used to work there a long, long time ago) are cosying up to none other than the same. I particularly enjoyed the following paragraph:

"We provide access to a very large collection of proprietary content to millions of professional users around the world. This includes more than 4.6 billion searchable documents through LexisNexis.com and 6.7 million articles through ScienceDirect,” said Keith McGarr, chief technology officer at Reed Elsevier. “Technology from Microsoft has played, and continues to play, a key role in our ongoing, aggressive online strategy."

What's amusing here is not just the fact that Reed Elsevier is using Microsoft's technology to be "aggressive" - "go on, bite 'is 'ead off" kind of stuff, I presume - but the way the word "proprietary" is added so gratuitously. It's almost as if Reed Elsevier wants to emphasise its close kinship to a certain other proud pusher of the proprietary. And it's rather drole to see this relationship made explicit like this, since half-jokingly I have been calling Reed Elsevier the Microsoft of the open access world for some time.

Wellcome Moves

The news that the Wellcome Trust has reached an agreement with three publishers of scientific journals to allow Wellcome-funded research published in their journals to be immediately available online and without charge to the reader is good news indeed.

Good because it will make large quantities of high-quality research immediately available, rather than after the tiresome six-month wait that some journals impose when providing a kind of pseudo-open access. Good, because it shows that the Wellcome Trust is willing to put its money where its mouth is, and to pay to get open access. Good, because by making this agreement with Blackwell, OUP and Springer, the Wellcome Trust puts pressure on the the top science publisher, Elsevier, to follow suit.

In fact, thinking about it, I was probably unkind to describe Nature as the Microsoft of the science world: that honour clearly belongs to Elsevier, both in terms of its power and resistance to opening up. Moreover, Nature, to its credit, now gets it about Wikipedia - it even made subscriber-only content freely available. And the conceptual distance between wikis and open access is surprisingly small; so maybe we're seeing the start of a historic shift at Nature.