Andrew Leigh, Academia online, On Line Opinion, July 3, 2006. Excerpt:
Seventeen years on the Internet offers unprecedented opportunities for academics to engage with the world. By using websites to post working papers and finished articles, and blogs to engage in discussions with the broader public, the Internet may potentially be the largest change in the way academics convey ideas since the invention of the printing press.
Making academic work available on one’s own website has many advantages. As undergraduates, postgraduates and the general community increasingly turn to search engines such as Google Scholar, work that is readily accessible is more likely to be read and cited. A spate of studies has shown that making articles [freely] available online boosts citations by 50 to 250 per cent. If you want to have your articles cited in other countries and other disciplines, your best bet is to post them on your website.
Despite the clear benefits of posting articles online, only about one-seventh of the research conducted by Australian academics is freely available on their websites....
A standard excuse for academics failing to post their papers on their websites is that copyright law prevents it. Yet as advocates of open access have pointed out, 93 per cent of journals have policies that permit authors to post a copy of an article on the author’s own website. Of the remaining few, most have no objections to authors posting a pre-publication version of their article....
Just as the printing press helped speed the decline of Latin, so too the Internet is undermining existing ways of conveying information. As Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin observes (pdf file 673KB), the “wired intelligentsia” now assume that “they can find out pretty much anything on Google”. For academics who are willing and able to make their research Google-friendly, the Internet offers plenty of new opportunities for conveying ideas to a broad audience....
Comment. Just one correction: It's much better to post one's work to an OA repository than to a personal web site. You won't have to move the content and break existing links when you change jobs or retire; the content will be indexed by academic search engines (like OAIster) as well as the mainstream giants (like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft); and in most cases dedicated librarians will assure its long-term preservation.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/03/2006 09:09:00 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.
