[E]arlier this week I was interviewed for a longer article by the people at First Author. I thought it would be good to share my answers with you all as it gives an insight into what we are planning for in terms of functionality for PhysMath Central. I should have stated that some of these features may not be there on launch, but it gives our development team something to aim for (sorry guys). In any case they will be there very soon afterwards....
[FA] The physics and maths academic communities were pioneering in their adoption of open access, notably with the founding of Arxiv. You also have experience in the commercial sector. How will you work with and borrow from the experience of both these sectors?
We are a commercial company providing an open access service. From a commercial standpoint open access makes sense. Scientists are demanding it and it is almost seen as unethical in some fields to publish results in a subscription journal. It is difficult to see the future of subscription journals as rosy.
But open access does not necessarily imply 'free'. If we are based on a sound financial footing, that bodes well for the long-term future of open access. We are not dependent on grants or philanthropy and will be able to grow with the growing interest in open access in the future.
[FA] You recently promised to take advantage of new technologies to communicate research findings clearly and to meet the challenges of the future. Can you give some examples of these technologies and how you believe they will change the ways scientists research, collaborate and publish?
Sure - this is one of the most exciting parts of working in open access. Not only can we develop tools and services around our data, but anyone can. All articles are available, for free, to anyone in fully-formed XML, so we hope to see some suite of services like 'Google Labs' develop around this data.
However, for our part we intend to use new technology to support the scientific process in many ways. Apart from the tight arXiv integration already mentioned we are also going to use wikis with the editorial board members to refine the scope of the journals, journal blogs to inform everyone of editorial developments, OAI-PMH to update A&I services, RSS for journal content updates, multimedia to support the online text, comments from readers on each article, and we are very keen in working on ways to further structure and open up our data to other services. Other developments, such as 'tagging' of articles and refining the peer-review process will be considered if there is an appetite for it from the community we serve.
There is also an increasing drive to make raw data of experimental results available alongside the article itself. For particle collision data, for example, this would be problematic given the sheer volume of data - but this barrier will come down with time and for some fields it is already possible to publish raw data, so we will be investigating this option in the coming weeks.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/21/2006 10:39:00 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.
