Richard Poynder, Time to take the red pill, Open and Shut, October 17, 2005. After an extensive discussion of Stephen Arnold's criticisms of Google from a keynote address at Internet Librarian International 2005 (London, October 10-11, 2005), Poynder shifts to OA. Excerpt:
As it turns out, one of the more organised and advanced initiatives with the potential to help create a non-commercial web is the open access (OA) movement — a movement, in fact, in which librarians have always played a very active role. For while the movement's original impetus was solely to liberate scholarly peer-reviewed articles from behind the subscription firewalls imposed by commercial publishers, there are grounds for suggesting it could develop into something grander, in both scope and scale. How come? As scholarly publishers have consistently and obdurately refused to cooperate with the OA movement in its attempts to make scientific papers freely available on the Web, the emphasis of the movement has over time shifted from trying to persuade publishers to remove the toll barriers, to encouraging researchers to do it themselves by self-archiving their published papers, either in institutional repositories (IRs), or in subject-specific archives like the arXiv preprints repository and PubMed Central, the US National Institutes of Health free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences papers....Clearly there is a valuable potential role here for information professionals, should they choose to seize the opportunity. After all, what better way for disenchanted librarians to make themselves indispensable in a new and relevant way — not by playing their traditional role as gateways to information (putting themselves between the information and the user), but as facilitators able to help researchers and other data creators collaborate and share information. If this means abandoning some of their traditional skills for new ones then so be it. Now there's a topic for discussion at Internet Librarian International 2006! The fact is, it's time for information professionals to stop bemoaning the loss of some perceived golden age, and take control of the Web. In short, it's time to reach for the red pill!
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/17/2005 10:39:00 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.
