Open Access News

Traditional open access is, in my view, a probable (but not certain) prerequisite for the emergence of fully developed large-scale computational approaches to the scholarly literature. It may not be a sufficient prerequisite, particularly if the legal and systems architecture frameworks currently being developed and deployed to support traditional open access are not quickly adjusted to accommodate the needs of open computational access....

The case for the benefits of open computational access to the scholarly literature is also much more complex than the arguments usually marshaled for traditional open access — in part because these benefits are indirect, and in part because they are still considered largely speculative and unproven. They are indirect in that they merely open the way for various players with good ideas to advance the progress of research and scholarship in perhaps new and perhaps more accelerated ways....(Note that, paradoxically, computational access to a scholarly literature for the purposes of indexing may also make that literature more economically valuable in the non-open access case, in that it may increase demand: witness the interest of commercial journal publishers in having their material indexed in search engines.)...

As the scholarly literature moves to digital form, what is actually needed to move beyond a system that just replicates all of our assumptions that the this literature is only read, and read only by human beings, one article at a time?...What is needed to allow the application of computational technologies to extract new knowledge, correlations and hypotheses from collections of scholarly literature? Part of the answer is legal. Clearly we need freedom to copy, rehost, repurpose and compute upon the components of this literature....The other part of the requirement is technical. We need to see provisions in hosting systems for large-scale replication as well as item-by-item downloads of occasional copies of parts of the scholarly literature....

The opportunities are truly stunning. They point towards entirely new ways to think about the scholarly literature (and the underlying evidence that supports scholarship) as an active, computationally enabled representation of knowledge that lives, grows and interacts with its contributors rather than as a passive archive or record. They suggest ways in which information technology can accelerate the rate of scientific discovery and the growth of scholarship. It would be a disgrace if we allowed the inertia of historic scholarly publishing practices and the intellectual property arrangements that underlie these patterns to foreclose such opportunities. Open access offers an important simplification and reduction of the barriers if its development is shaped in a way that is responsive to these opportunities, although it is certainly not a panacea in its current form....The implications of resolving this incompatibility [between scholarship and the traditional intellectual property framework] will ultimately have far more extensive ramifications than what we might today characterize as the "traditional" open access movement; but they will be crucial to the future of science and scholarship.