Most academics do what they do because they genuinely want to make the world a better place, in whatever way they can. They do not publish in open-source journals not because they don’t care, but because these are the only journals that “count.” Harvard has mandated that all articles by its faculty must be open-source at least one year after original publication in closed-source. The American National Institutes of Health also mandates open-source publishing for all research it funds.

We are starting to make a difference!

There’s a good reason for researchers to want their papers publicly available: if people can’t read your stuff, it’s hard for you to participate and be visible in online conversations. This is esp important for researchers who are looking for corporate clients.

Just yesterday I came across a blog post that summarized what looked like a very interesting article — but the article wasn’t available online, only via a $$$ academic journal subscription.

So I tweeted the blog post, because I couldn’t tweet the article.

And sadly, the original researcher probably won’t get any attention from that (of course he’s mentioned in the blog post, but most people won’t bother to look further.)

The blogger will get the clicks and the credit for her summary write-up.

And the researcher (who’s a professor at a business school and who probably would like to be attracting companies that would pay him for consulting) lost one small opportunity to get his name out there.