I was inspired by a talk by Jim Pitman, President of the IMS, at the Joint Statistical Meetings in August, “Open Access to Professional Information” so when an opportunity arose for me to give a talk at our local Grand Rounds, I suggested a similar talk with the title “Open Access Publication and its impact on research and the practice of medicine.”
Dr. Pitman’s talk is summarized nicely in an IMS Bulletin article, which is available on the web in [df format.
He has several other valuable links on his home page.
There is some criticism of the open access movement. One of the more notable articles is
- Aronson JK. Open access publishing: too much oxygen?" BMJ 2005;330:759 (2 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7494.759. Available in html format or pdf format
An online supplement to this article lists some “advantages and disadvantages” of open access, but really the advantages are so quickly qualified that the whole piece is quite one sided (not that one-sided is a bad thing).
The talk is on October 18, so I have to hustle. I’m going to write an abstract and course objectives and place it on my training page.
You can find an earlier version of this page on my old website.