Joshua M. Pearce is the John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation at the Thompson Centre for Engineering Leadership & Innovation. He holds appointments at Ivey Business School, the top ranked business school in Canada and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Western University in Canada, a top 1% global university. At Western he runs the Free Appropriate Sustainability Technology (FAST) research group. His research concentrates on the use of open source appropriate technology (OSAT) to find collaborative solutions to problems in sustainability and to reduce poverty. His research spans areas of engineering of solar photovoltaic technology, open hardware, and distributed recycling and additive manufacturing (DRAM) using RepRap 3-D printing. He wrote the Open-Source Lab and Create, Share, and Save Money Using Open-Source Projects.
Authored Comments
The numbers speak for themselves - open source hardware business models simply work and Aleph Object is showing how competitive companies of the future will operate.
This is an interesting concept. There is a lot going on now with respect to open access and academia as it is clear the apple cart is turning over in the scientific publishing world.
For this particular approach to work - there needs to a critical mass of literature published in the RIO to generate an impact factor that will attract higher quality work. The publishing charges, although low compared to open access fees for major publishers are still high compared to ability to publish open access versions of articles with the existing licenses from the conventional publishers for free. The success of institutional repositories, arxiv, academia.edu and researchgate speak to this.
Frankly, I think now that it is pretty clear that the cost associated with academic publishing have been squashed by the internet - and the most difficult tasks (peer review and editing) are generally unpaid and performed by academics themselves -- that both traditional models (pay to subscribe and pay to publish) are in trouble.