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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

open access humanities' journals + medicine « Previous | |Next »
May 8, 2008

I've just stumbled into the Open Humanities Press -- a collection of open access journals in the humanities. What a wonderful idea in contrast to the Griffith Review being hidden behind a subscription wall despite the public subsidy from the Australia Council.

As the folks at Cosmos and History say:

Open-access journals offer free access to articles and broaden the readership of publications beyond the restrictions of traditional commercial publishing. In any 12 month period Cosmos and History has around 900,000 ‘hits’, this equates to around 140,000 ‘unique visits’. However, what really matters is article downloads; currently with five issues published we are getting around 150 article downloads a day, with some individual articles being downloaded as often as 10 times a day.

Opponents of the open access journals assert that the pay-for-access model is necessary to ensure that the publisher is adequately compensated for their work. Scholarly journal publishers that support pay-for-access claim that the "gatekeeper" role they play, maintaining a scholarly reputation, arranging for peer review, and editing and indexing articles, require economic resources that are not supplied under an open access model.

Well the digital age changes a lot of that, and so we have something like Philosophy Ethics and Humanities in Medicine.

The editors say in the first issue:

Those interested in the conceptual and historical roots of medicine will not need reminding that early on work in natural philosophy spanned philosophy, science, and medicine. While scientific advances have led to the development of an ever-growing range of scientific disciplines and medical specialties, a consideration of the grounding concepts and ethical principles that underlie health care remains as crucial as ever. Indeed, advances in knowledge, and changes in practice, mean that these grounding concepts and ethical principles require constant reconsideration and reworking. This, then, is the work of philosophy of medicine, of bioethics, and of work at the overlap between the clinic and the humanities.To our knowledge Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine is the first open-access journal that aims to expand the discussion on health care by focusing on the intersection between philosophy, ethics, and the humanities and clinical theory and practice.

An interesting article in an early issue of Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicineis Grant Gillett's Medical science, culture, and truth He says that medical science has followed the ideal of scientific objectivity so that we make observations, offer theories about the realities they indicate and assess those theories in the light of our ongoing accumulation of clinical and scientific evidence.This scientific objectivity is now stated in terms of scientific realism according to which the world is the way science says it is because there is a transparent and simply verifiable correspondence between our scientific descriptions and the reality they describe. On this view, science reveals the nature of the world and the processes going on within it and discloses facts about human health and disease.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:36 AM |