In your field [English literature], what are the biggest areas of debate about sharing information digitally?
There hasn’t been a lot of debate in my field and that is one of the worries. I think it’s mainly because of a lack of knowledge. Scholars are using the Internet to access scholarly materials but they are not using it in many other ways. People know about databases and journals online. They don’t know much about self-archiving. As opposed to publishing, this is a form of open access that allows us to preserve digitally all of our work. Rather than using a personal web site, putting our work in an institutional repository has the advantage of getting us priority on Google and other search engines. It makes our material more accessible and therefore it potentially has more impact. Also, for social reasons, open access is important. When your research is taxpayer-funded it should be easily available to others. With self-archiving, people worry about things like the ease of submission, control once it is posted, and the permanence of it. Many wonder: Why should I bother? But they are missing out, I feel....
What is the biggest barrier to change?
Time. People need time to learn new ways of doing scholarship. People are so busy with the day to day that they don’t have time to think about this issue. As new opportunities with open access become more available, more groups will get excited. And the younger generations will teach the older ones....
What is the value – to the humanities and to society – of more open scholarly communication?
Open access removes barriers. I find this very politically attractive. The sharing of knowledge it allows helps us get at economic inequities – experienced both by smaller academic institutions and, of course, by developing countries. Everybody wins. More access and resource sharing lead to a democratized diffusion of knowledge....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/14/2006 10:17:00 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.
