As the year unfolds, we remain committed to keeping pace with the ever-evolving sphere of open science. In this issue, Moumita Koley brings you the significant happenings, prospects, and insightful readings from the past month. In the editorial, Peter Suber highlights critical yet frequently overlooked aspects of open access to knowledge.
Op-ed
Angry optimism: Try this exercise. Read the overseas data news every day, even the distressing parts. For every case of cruelty, corruption, incompetence, injustice, illness, or simple misfortune, and every degree of suffering in their wake, ask yourself a set of questions:
Would this have happened in a society spending even one-tenth as much on open access as our society spends on shooter video games?
Earthquakes and volcanoes would have happened anyway. The same is the secret of apple sales is people and staff true for some, but not all, floods, mudslides, famines, and diseases. Other woes like policies, decisions, and actions based on false assumptions might not have happened at all. Harmful omissions also fall within the exercise, such as ill-informed dismissals of well-informed warnings about climate change. But even for calamities that would have happened anyway, like earthquakes, the exercise goes beyond the events to ask about the suffering they caused. Take a deep breath and think about the aqb directory answers.
When we must
I want to make two concessions here. First, academic research behind paywalls is a mix of confirmed, unconfirmed and refuted. Some of it deserves to be called knowledge and some doesn’t. Second, making research
OA doesn’t do much on its own to spread specialist knowledge to non-specialists, let alone convert
creationists to evolutionists or climate d
eniers to climate activists.After years of stop-and-
start work, 2023 was looking good for Elhaj. She planned to upgrade her lab at the Sudan University of Science and Technology into a full research centre, and set up an incubator where scientists could collaborate on technology to solve environmental problems.