David Worlock, Open Access: Free for All – Or more expensive for everyone, his keynote presentation from the ASIDIC fall meeting, Open Access: Removing the Barriers (Phoenix, September 19-21, 2004), from the meeting web site. Worlock's slides are also online. Excerpt: "Data mining within articles and the visualisation of the relationships between retrieved references is becoming important. Above all, productivity may ultimately rest in knowing what not to read. The exciting and rapidly developing competitive framework around A and I services, point to the fact that the argument is moving on from 'access' and 'who pays' to certainty and authenticity. If we really are going to a mixed economy of pay per view and free access, someone must know what is where and in what version. Elsevier's huge investment in Scopus and Scirus alongside Thomson in ISI's Web of Knowledge, and the industry CrossRef/CrossRef Search environment with added Google, look to an outsider like symptoms of a healthy and competitive market, not the reverse. As these services move into their second generation, a great deal of publishing activity may not surround original primary article publishing, but secondary services for tracking and relating pre-prints and post-prints vicariously, and sometimes carelessly, filed in local and institutional repositories. And then move this vision forward to the semantic web. Within a decade we confidently expect to be searching on meaning, not just through word matching. Our best knowledge scientists we are already creating domain ontologies and peopling them with inference rules and refined taxonomic structures. Publishers invested in XML – a vital step towards this goal – and will be expected to apply RDF widely to make the semantic vision come true. If public institutions are not prepared to re-invest their own repositories, then it will become progressively harder for them to play in advanced information service marketplaces."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/01/2004 01:19:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
