The Value of OA

[Peter Banks <pbanks@bankspub.com>]

Rick Anderson's editorial in the most recent Learned Publishing 
(http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?aid=723) is an 
excellent summary of the potential benefits and costs of open 
access.

However, like most commentators, Anderson takes the value of OA 
as a given: "There is no question that OA offers potentially 
significant benefits to society. All other things being equal, 
free public access to scientific information is clearly a good 
thing." I think that this common assumption merits a far more 
critical examination than it has received.

The assumption that the more information, the better, is shared 
by the OA movement's new partner FreeCulture.org, whose manifesto 
states: "Through the democratizing power of digital technology 
and the Internet, we can place the tools of creation and 
distribution, communication and collaboration, teaching and 
learning into the hands of the common person -- and with a truly 
active, connected, informed citizenry, injustice and oppression 
will slowly but surely vanish from the earth."

One has to admire the youthful optimism of that lofty statement, 
as Utopian in its own way as the Port Huron Statement of an 
earlier generation of radical students.  But communications is 
already in the hands of the common person; any idiot (including 
me) can have a blog, a Web page, or a podcast. I haven't noticed 
injustice, oppression, or ignorance retreating much. If anything, 
the democratization of communications has given a platform to the 
zealous, the partisan, and sometimes the deranged. The 
'connected, informed citizenry' often seems to use Internet 
technology for tasks like deconstructing the latest American Idol 
episode or speculating on the death of Anna Nicole Smith.

But even if democratic communications probably won't save mankind 
for its worst tendencies, can access to scientific information 
accelerate research, improve clinical practice, or increase the 
understanding by patients and the public of science and medicine?

In talking with researchers at major research institutions, I 
have yet to meet a single one who felt that access to information 
was a limiting factor in research. Perhaps free access to 
information will help those in less connected locations -- 
non-research colleges, remote medical practices, developing 
countries. Perhaps. It would be good to actually examine this 
idea rather than accepting it as a given. It might be that free 
access to original research has a small effect -- but some other 
form of Internet communication would have a far more significant 
effect. Suppose, for example, that every clinician had access to 
information such as that in the Cochrane Collaboration and could 
easily and efficiently access the latest and best evidence-based 
medicine. Isn't that likely to be of far greater value than 
assuming that physicians have time to wade through primary 
literature? (They don't.)

As for the public and patients, there has been too little 
examination of how lay people use and misuse Internet 
information. This is NOT a paternalistic argument for withholding 
information, so please don't accuse me of elitism. It is an 
argument to critically examine how people use information, and to 
elucidate the ways in which it either empowers or misleads them.

One has only to troll the many Internet message boards about 
various diseases to appreciate how often patients attempt to use 
the literature to self-diagnose or self-medicate, sometimes 
delaying seeking a medical consultation for ominous symptoms for 
months or years. Again, perhaps access to the primary literature 
would have a small effect, but some other form of translation 
(clinically significant research with translational materials, 
say) might have a much greater effect.

The study of how information changes research, practice, and 
understanding is too important to remain unexamined or to remain 
the untested given of the open access movement.

(PS "The Port Huron Statement" is under strict copyright 
protection by the University of Virginia. That is, the defining 
statement of 1960s student radicalism is effectively in a glass 
case in a museum. Watch out, Free Culture, before you, too, 
become a cultural artifact.)

Peter Banks
Banks Publishing
Publications Consulting and Services
pbanks@bankspub.com
www.bankspub.com
www.associationpublisher.com/blog/