Open access publishing is great, but what if you can’t capture your research in words? Over at the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, Jeffery Young reports that in order to expand the reach and accessibility of their historical elections mapping project, digital historians at the University of Richmond moved their data from an in-house system to two platforms familiar to many web surfers: Google Maps and Google Earth. ...
But Young’s point isn’t just about communicating and collecting research–it’s about thinking of open formats like Google’s mapping system (which stores data in a special flavor of the eXtensible Markup Laguage, or XML, called KML) as new frameworks that can shape the research product itself. He asks whether open platforms like Google should be the tools of choice or whether home-grown systems are the better way to go. ...
So would it make sense to consider stipulating that some map-based research end up in an open, accessible format? The current National Institutes of Health policy on open-access publishing mandates that research funded with NIH dollars published in peer-reviewed journals must also be submitted to the PubMed database within 12 months. An agency like the National Science Foundation could experiment with providing incentives or tools to research grantees doing mappable work to provide their research in open formats. What do you think?
Comment.
The choice here isn't between "open platforms" or "home-grown systems". Widely-used platforms aren't necessarily open (for instance, Adobe's Flash); homebrew platforms aren't necessarily closed (as long as the specification is public and anyone is allowed to implement it). Openness and familiarity aren't always linked; in some cases (like Flash), they're at odds.
For clarity: Google Maps/Earth is an open platform; it's not open content. The GIS data, satellite imagery, etc. are proprietary (some may be from public sources, but others are licensed exclusively or nonexclusively to Google). In addition, the software that runs Google Earth and Google Maps is proprietary. But users can add their own content, and the KML format for doing so is open.
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 11/05/2008 09:13:00 PM.
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.
