Re: The value of open access & update to the Dramatic Growth of Open Access

["Imre Simon" <imres.g@gmail.com>]

On 4/3/07, Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca> wrote:

> Indeed, if one wants to understand issues relating to lack of 
> access, talk to people who lack access, not people who have it. 
> This includes most of us; researchers at major research 
> institutions in the world's wealthiest countries form a very 
> small proportion of the world's population.
I would like to complement this assertion. Even the richest 
researcher working in the richest institution needs universal 
access to the scientific literature, not as much for himself or 
herself but for his or her (or most likely someone else's) 
computer program.

We can build today computer programs to mine the literature and 
discover a lot of otherwise hidden structure and hidden 
clustering in the whole of the literature. This can only be done 
by computers, feeding them the full text of all articles. With 
today's fragmented access policies the said very rich researcher 
can access, as a human, the papers he or she wishes to read, but 
can't feed all the paper's full text in a computer program to 
discover the hidden structures and connections. Even he or she 
looses a wealth of information.

Hence, even the richest researcher, working at the richest 
institution, needs universal access but no one has such a thing 
today. Open Access would surely be the best way to get universal 
access for everyone. How to get (universal) Open Access though, 
well, that seems to be a rather elusive subject.

Imre Simon
http://www.ime.usp.br/~is/