Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, April 05, 2007

OA advances science

Alma Swan, Open Access and the Progress of Science, American Scientist, April-June 2007.  Excerpt:

...If we could start now, equipped with the World Wide Web, computers in every laboratory or institution and a global view of the scientific research effort, would we come up with the system for communicating knowledge that we have today?...

No, we would think of a new way, one that would provide for rapid dissemination of results that any scientist could access, easily and without barriers of cost. We might debate how to implement quality control, how to ensure that originators of ideas or findings are given their proper due, how our new and better system should be paid for and how to deal with bandwidth constraints in some parts of the world. But no one would say, "Hey, why don't we only let some researchers see this stuff and see how science gets on?" Yet that is precisely where we are today....

The bickering over varied business models, and the side arguments over public access to publicly funded results, obscure a larger, more important question: Can open access...advance science? My work involves measuring, analyzing and assessing developments in scholarly communication. From that perspective I argue that the answer is yes, and that the advance of science is the prime reason that access is an imperative....

[A]n open-access article has greater visibility, and it's becoming evident that scientists do take the opportunity to read and use what they would otherwise not have seen....[A]cross a range of scholarly disciplines, opening access to articles increases their citation rate....

[I]n some fields of physics (high-energy, condensed matter and astrophysics) [open access] has been commonplace for more than a decade. The arXiv, an open-access archive now maintained at Cornell University, contains copies of almost every article published in these disciplines, deposited by the authors for all to use. Tim Brody of Southampton University has measured the time between when articles are deposited in arXiv and when citations to those articles begin to appear. Over the years, this interval has been shrinking as the arXiv has come into near-universal use....In other words, a system built on open access is shortening the research cycle in these disciplines, accelerating progress and increasing efficiency in physics.

Open access can also advance science by enabling semantic computer technologies to work more effectively on the research record....Semantic technologies can do two things. First, they hold out the promise of being able to integrate different types of research output—articles, databases and other digital material—to form a single, integrated information resource and to create new, meaningful and useful information from it....Second, Web 2.0 technologies, the set of tools that aid collaborative effort....

Open access also enables a different kind of software tool to aid the management of science. Such tools...can track the evolution of ideas, topics and fields and facilitate trends analysis, enabling better prediction of which research areas are waxing and waning. The value of such tools to research managers, policymakers and funders will be enormous, enabling better funding and planning decisions to be made in the interest of scientific progress. To work, though, they need access to the full-text of research articles—an open literature.

Finally,...open literature facilitates the finding and coming together of disparate scientific efforts that in a closed-access world are circumscribed by conventional definitions of topic, field or discipline and isolated from one another in discrete families of journals....

New work by economist John Houghton and colleagues at the University of Victoria in Melbourne shows that enhanced access to research findings is likely to result in an enhanced return on investment in research and development, something that can benefit every economy in the world....

Comment.  Alma is right:  the central question is whether OA advances science and scholarship better than the current system.  If it does, then we should agree on the goal and work together on the means.  We may be close to agreement on the goal already --or at least most the bickering seems to be about the means.  Some of this bickering is unavoidable:  there are some honest disagreements about the means.  But some is not:  there is widespread fixation on illusory problems and repetition of groundless objections.  This confuses many researchers and policy-makers new to the debate, who erroneously conclude that the disagreements go to the merits of OA itself rather than to implementation details.  If we were more explicit in our agreement on the goal, then more stakeholders would join the work of implementing it and the work could be less fractious and more collaborative.  And if we encountered new, real problems --problems not already solved and not based on misunderstandings-- then we could start from agreement that they were worth solving.

Update. Steve Hitchcock has blogged some excerpts from discussion lists in which supporters and critics of OA were debating the issues raised by Alma Swan's article. (Alma's article was already in press at the time.)