Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, May 09, 2006

The EC report on OA and interoperability

Tracey Caldwell, EC report calls for more OA content, Information World Review, May 9, 2006. Excerpt:

Linking and markup technologies must be promoted if open access is to become more widely adopted, according to one of the recommendations of the EC report on scientific publishing, released last month. But critics have slammed the recommendation, saying it is ‘putting the cart before the horse’.

Recommendation A5 of Study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publications market in Europe states that the European Commission should support R&D on interoperability issues such as meta-data and the XML format. It also says the EC should be promoting the wide implementation of linking technologies, especially the open standard OpenURL, and interoperable standard protocols, especially the OAI-PMH.

Stevan Harnad, OA champion, said the EC had got things the wrong way round. “A5 is about fostering interoperable tools to improve visibility. But without the content, there’s nothing to be made visible. Developing the tools is the easy part. The tools we already have are already far more powerful than the sparse Open Access content on which they are used....”

Peter Suber, open access policy strategist, believes the XML recommendation will help interoperability in the long term. “But it could be a barrier to self archiving if it was made a pre-requisite [and] the author [had] to spend time marking it up,” he said. Suber said the next big step in interoperability is full-text harvesting. “We need to get agencies that fund research to make open access a condition of that research.”

PS: I'd only add here, as I did in the interview, that the report's primary recommendation, A1, would mandate OA archiving for publicly-funded research. That's exactly what's needed. If the report intended A1 (on OA) to take priority over A5 (on interoperability), then it has its priorities right.