Rather than simply go through the list of contributions and report briefly what was said, we have chosen to pull together some of the overall ideas that were presented and debated....Unfortunately, the research councils and higher education bodies, especially in the UK, appear to be ready to accept the 'author pays' model as the only model worth supporting. Astrid Wissenburg of the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK, was unable to say at the conference what the new research councils' policy on open access is going to be, but rumour has it that 'author payments' built into research grants will be the main instrument. She expressed worries that this might affect those who will be working on a basis other than research grants, and one can predict that those worries will come to fruition. On the international level, the inequalities among countries will be even more striking than at present. Mark McCabe of the Georgia Institute of Technology addressed this issue from an economic modelling standpoint....In response to a question, he also noted that the 'subsidised journal' model, operated, among others, by Information Research, maximises social value and is the model that ought to be supported by the research councils. Research funding agencies, please note!...
Making maximum use of the information available in open access sources was the subject of John Wilbanks's paper on the NeuroCommons. The idea behind the NeuroCommons is that facts in what are, to all intents and purposes, large databases of textual data, can be harvested and compared with one another, using natural language processing software (commercial publishers often ban the use of such software on their sites, hence the need for open access) to create a Semantic Web of neurological research. Thus, rather than needing to dig into the research literature, the neurological scientist would be able to discover from the NeuroCommons, what facts have been shown to be associated in which studies and with what degree of validity and reliability. This 're-use' of data, it would seem, would also maximise social value. This was very enthusiastic and competent presentation that also inspired many members of the audience....
One of the alternatives to open access publishing is open archiving and two speakers addressed this issue: Jean-Claude Guedon proposed that repositories could develop into primary publication sources as authors found that their work was accessible and cited by doing so. He noted that in some fields, with well established repositories (fundamental physics for example), citations to journal articles were now being cited well before the journal actually published the item, because of their appearance in the repository. He suggested that rather than pre-publication peer review operating, process of open post-publication review could emerge in these repositories.
How one persuades people initially to contribute to repositories is a prevailing problem and Alma Swan partly addressed this issue in her presentation. She believed that the mandating of deposition by universities is key to the success of repositories: however, even where mandates exist, those managing the repository (often librarians) are having difficulty in getting acceptance. Swan presented her ideas within an evolutionary science analogy and suggested that the open access model, in its various forms, was likely to emerge successful from the evolutionary battle.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/06/2006 10:44:00 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.
