Of all industries that the community of Applied Mechanics is deeply involved with, none is more in a state of flux than the Publishing Industry....It is conceivable that eventually anybody can publish anything in repositories like the arXiv. This scenario is not as radical or futuristic as it may sound; anybody can already post anything online, at almost no cost. Such repositories formalize this practice by providing two ingredients essential to scholarly publishing: trustworthy timestamps and permanent accessibility....Here I wish to...focus on a hypothetical question: What if all papers have already become openly accessible?...Authors own their papers, except they may not delete papers from repositories....Journals select papers and comment on them. [PS: Such journals are often called overlay journals.] When all papers are in open-access repositories, journals will still serve important functions. Once a journal selects a paper from the repositories, possibly peer-reviewed, the paper will automatically gain a special status of being associated with the journal. The same paper can be selected by multiple journals. All journals will rest on the same raw data: papers in the repositories. Journals that select lasting papers and host incisive discussions will be the winners....Since 1991, an author can post a paper in the arXiv, and then publish the same paper in journals like Physical Review Letters. The arXiv has not diminished the preeminence of such journals....Start pages– websites designed for reading news – will allow you to see new papers published in your favorite journals at a glance. You can also subscribe the results [of such a feed]....In effect, you have just created a journal on the subject of [your search terms]....Once all papers become openly accessible, you can...tag them with phrases like “biomechanics” or “nanotechnology.”...[W]hen you search for such a tag, you will see a list of items tagged by other users, and the number of users that have bookmarked each item. Therefore, [tagging tools like del.icio.us] make it easier to find the best, or at least the most popular, items for a search.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/12/2006 09:52:00 AM.
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.
