OA is part of new reality for scholarly communication Blaise Cronin will give a public lecture next week (November 22) at the U of California at San Diego, Publish and/or Perish: Changes in Scholarly Communication. Excerpt from his abstract, w hich is already online: 'Publish or perish!' Generations of scholars have lived with this crude exhortation. Forget the romanticized image of the lone wolf scholar --a pensive Wittgenstein pacing his rooms at Cambridge, Einstein ambling to and from his office at the Institute for Advanced Studies. The quotidian reality is rather different, as authors jostle to bring their intellectual wares to the attention of their peers and libraries struggle to deal with the 'crisis in scholarly publishing'. The era of the gentleman-scientist and independent scholar has ceded to Big Science. Here globally distributed collaborations and hyperauthorship are the norm. The 'author-function' is being recast in an age of 'post-academic science.' In fact, 'Publish or perish!' is beginning to sound passé; it is quite possible these days to publish and perish, given the flood of books and articles. Publish in a third-tier journal and you'll be damned; publish conventionally when your peers are placing their work in open access journals and you may just be ignored. Want to grow your citation count? Just try self-archiving....