Recently, IP scholar and government corruption critic Larry Lessig gave a talk at CERN in which he talked about the mismatch between the goals of copyright and scientific publishing. I was excited to watch it, but . . . well, I fell asleep partway through. (It's a long talk.)
I haven't been well lately (thus the lack of posts) so I should probably thank Professor Lessig for the much-needed nap. It honestly wasn't because the video was boring - I love Lessig talks and their typographic design, and if it was boring, I wouldn't be sharing it here. But prior to the nap, I was a little troubled that Lessig's critique of for-profit scientific publishing didn't address the reason most often raised for needing the current system: peer review. We don't need copyright to drive scientific research or publication - reputational and professional mechanisms do that - but it does drive most of the traditional outlets for peer review, and fully replacing those has to be part of any resolution to the open access issue.
This has all been discussed at length by blogger/PLOS open access expert Bora Zivkovic, among others, and I won't pretend to give it thorough coverage in this post; I was just surprised that Lessig didn't go into it. Unless he did after I fell asleep. In which case, my bad.
The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge from lessig on Vimeo.
Via BoingBoing (like they need my "via")