Many have wondered why the first scientists to embrace Open Access (OA) were physicists.
That physicists were the OA trailblazers is not in doubt: it was, after all, theoretical physicist Paul Ginsparg who in 1991 created the seminal physics preprint repository arXiv....
Maybe because physicists have been sharing paper preprints with one another for decades? OA advocate Eberhard Hilf tells me that this began as long ago as 1932, when the Italian Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi started to routinely mail preprints of his papers to colleagues prior to publishing them....
In this light, arXiv was simply a digital manifestation of a practice that began long before the Internet....
Miriam Blake head of the library at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)...was kind enough to ask one of her colleagues – LANL librarian Michelle Garcia – to see if she could find any reference to an OA mandate in the Los Alamos archives....
A few days later I had an email from Garcia. There was no mention of a mandate in her message, but she did send me something of greater inherent interest: a link to the 1945 Smyth Report.
The Smyth Report, Garcia explained, is “the earliest example of any kind of acknowledgement on the need for public release of information specifically on the development of atomic energy by the US government. Following the Smyth Report, there was a declassification program headed by a committee of senior scientists that led the Manhattan Project, which came up with the declassification guidelines in 1946.” ...
As the preface to the Report puts it, “The ultimate responsibility for our nation’s policy rests on its citizens and they can discharge such responsibilities wisely only if they are informed.”
[T]he Smyth Report stressed that scientific information should be released to the public not because its creation had been funded by taxpayers, but because it would enable them to make informed decisions about how the science should be used....
Back to the question of why physicists were the first to embrace OA: Could it be that the US atomic weapons declassification program helped create the preprint culture characteristic of the particle physics community?
In other words, in being asked to think through the reasons for and against making their research freely available, could it be that physicists became acculturated into assuming that the default position should be one in which scientific information is made as widely available as possible, as soon as possible – on the assumption that in most cases the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages? ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/28/2009 01:15:00 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.
