1) Metadata that is "Open Access" gets proliferated throughout the web in a very efficient manner. The collections I'm speaking of are our ETD repository and the Journal of Digital Information. Over the past few months, our metadata for these collections has been proliferating over the web through various means. First of all, they are both harvested automatically by the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Second of all, they are harvested by specialty search engines focused on scholarly resources. They are being harvested by Google Scholar, Elsevier's Scirus, and Thompson-ISI's Current Web Contents and this is just what I know for sure. So the information that WE host is now included in these search engines, from the broadest web search to sites that are focused on serving the needs of scholars. This wouldn't have come about except for the fact that our content is available Open Access. Not just the full-text of the documents themselves, but our metadata as well! I think this is great. Since we are Open Access anyway, we don't measure success by profits, we measure it by use. We want to be used, hit, and downloaded as much as possible. We want our content to be cited and have scholarly impact....
2) A lot of metadata in library systems is not "Open Access." This makes it much harder, less efficient, and expensive to manage....
3) What is significant about these observations? In the future, I think metadata is going to become free-er, while the full-text content will be more controlled. I suspect that it will become beneficial for all parties involved to have "free" metadata, but enhance access controls to the content itself. It is the content that is so valuable, not the metadata. I also think that the control of access to content will be determined less by publishers and more by content creators. Some publishers (specifically Open Access publishers) will start providing more levels of access to content, and in this competitive environment, content creators will have a lot of options....Furthermore, if it turns out to be true that "Open Access" correlates to higher impact [PS: it is true], decisions on access levels will be influenced more by "impact" than commercial considerations. The power will be in the hands of the content creators.
(PS: Even non-OA publishers should provide OA to their metadata. It functions as free advertising that intermediaries, like search engines, are scrambling to pick up and publicize. It doesn't follow that full-text "will be" more controlled. But it may be. They are independent decisions. The usual reasons for providing OA to full-text continue to apply and we can hope that they will continue to have an effect.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/12/2005 02:45:00 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.
