Open access (OA) advocates like Peter Suber and my colleagues here at OA Librarian do a marvelous job of documenting the progress of the OA movement. In a post-OA world, however, what about findability? What about the search side of the equation? Without search engines like Google, for example, what happens to easy findability?? The problem is likely to be exacerbated as the web scales in size, and complexity. Authority destabilizes in open access models. I am thinking in terms of authority files in catalogues but also with respect to authoritative information. I grew up in a small suburb of Calgary, Alberta where authority was never questioned, where the World Book Encyclopedia was "what was right". For all its limitations, at least a ten year old could find the World Book confidently at the local public library. Can that same ten year old trust Wikipedia? OA librarians need to spend time and intellectual energy thinking about OA advocacy beyond free information for all. Dismantling paid search, for example. Advocating for OpenSearch, as in PubMed, but not just in medicine. Finally, the future of open access models on the web must be flexible enough to accomodate new means of findability - ie. algorithms, tagging, folksonomies, social software - but continue to build on the tried-and-true tenets of library science.
Comment. Thanks for the plug. I have a couple of nits to pick, however. (1) OA will enhance findability by making content open for indexing by all comers, from the established players to newcomers with innovative ideas. It's true that the adequacy of search is challenged by the rapid growth of the web, but it's also true that OA is a necessary condition for the adequacy of search in a rapidly growing web. OA does not depend findability, if only because because it always brings findability with it. It's more true to say that findability depends on OA. (2) Why does "authority destabilize in open access models"? I think Dean is mixing up OA and peer-review reform, which are independent projects. Authority may destablize for OA resources that bypass peer review, or experiment with less rigorous or more fallible vetting models, like Wikipedia. But there's nothing intrinsic to OA that calls for abandoning or weakening peer review. On the contrary, all the major OA declarations agree on the importance of peer review. Because the rigor of peer review does not depend on the medium or price of a publication, an OA journal or encyclopedia can acquire the same kind and level of authority as the best non-OA resources. Good examples are PLoS Biology and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In short, Wikipedia is not the poster-child of OA! It mixes OA with a communal-review model that is not at all typical of the journal literature central to the OA movement.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/10/2006 11:06:00 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.
