The dichotomy in being a writer on open source with a non-open access publisher

  • The publisher adds credibility to your work

versus

  • A self fulfilling prophecy where researchers want to publish in exclusive journals and closed -access books, for the sole reason that others did so as well before them and thereby donate their knowledge and money to the publisher

aaronswartz-v2

The dichotomy in being a writer on open source with a non-open access publisher?

  • I write on open source R , 
  • and I have been published (one book )
  • and am on contract to write two more ( R for Cloud Computing) and (R for Web and Social Media Analytics)
  • My publisher does have open access journals.
  • But the book is at $50. Most of India lives at less than 2$ per day. Thats 800 million people in my country alone.

But the publisher is the most reputed in this field. So what are my choices? How do I get more people to have choices to read books.

Take open knowledge , curate it, and turn it behind a $50 paywall. I am sorry, Aaron. People like me are the reason ……

 

Author: Ajay Ohri

http://about.me/ajayohri

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: