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Re: Are Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates Maoist Monstrosities?
Jan Szczepanski commented on some remarks I made in a recent
interview thus:
> In the late fifties Mao Zedong introduced that Great Leap and
> now fifty years later we are going to take a giant leap
> according to Dr Swan.
>
> In China backyard steel furnances would do the job; in Dr Swans
> world it's the mandate and local institutional repository that
> is going to change the world away from big industry and the
> capitalist society.
>
> Open Access is inevitable according to Dr Swan, as once
> Socialism was. Mandate is the key to the Open Access World.
> Instead of Five Year Plans we will have Metrics to see to it
> that the way forward is the Green Way.
>
> The commissars overlooking that the Giant Leap will happen is
> "Pro-Vice- Chancellors" at the universities, the real
> reprsentatives of the research communities.
I doubt I'm the only one to find the leap from OA mandates to
Maoism somewhat challenging. According to Dr Szczepanski's
mandate/Maoism link the new mandatory rule on NIH-funded research
surely means that the US now has a communist Congress, something
the Washington Post and New York Times surprisingly failed to
recognise, thus missing the scoop of the millennium.
Nevertheless, we can now look forward to the outing of all those
closet communist rectors and provosts who introduce mandatory OA
policies. Clearly OA is going to be much more effective than
McCarthy ever was.
> How will the future be?
>
> AS: Once the content and the infrastructure are in place we are
> going to see knowledge take a giant leap. The way to view it is
> that the last 7-8,000 years or so of human civilisation's
> struggle for knowledge has taken place on one plane, determined
> and constrained by what our own brains can absorb, put together
> and make sense of: now we are about to move to another plane
> altogether, with the help of machine brains.
>
>>From profit makers to machine brains, what a future!
It is easier to make the leap from mandates to machine brains
(semantic computer technologies), though, - the link is that
mandates produce the open access content on which those machine
tools can work - and those who are interested in this issue may
like some of the resources that I found helpful when trying to
get to grips with both the potential and the technologies of the
semantic web:
1. A JISC Briefing Paper on text-mining written by the experts at
the UK's National Centre for Text Mining:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/pub_textmining.aspx
2. For a nice, relatively recent overview of the semantic web,
particularly helpful on the issue of ontologies and explaining
clearly how they are applied in life science research: Shadbolt
et al - "The Semantic Web Revisited".
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12614/
3. John Wilbanks on text mining the neuroscience literature. Try
this: http://sciencecommons.org/projects/data/, but if you can,
do go and listen to him in person. John spellbinds a conference
hall with his energetic and jargon-free explanation of semantic
tools at work on neuroscience content.
4. Peter Murray-Rust's group's work on mining the chemical
literature, now well-developed: For example, see "Communication
and re-use of chemical information in biosciences."
http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/34579
5. Clark et al's interesting and forward-looking pedagogical
perspective: Clark K, Parsia B and Hendler J: "Will the semantic
web change education?".
http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/2004/3/clark-2004-3-disc-paper.html
To help things along, the Nature Publishing Group has developed
OTMI, the Open Text-Mining Interface, which enables machines to
get at the facts in a text-based research article (while
preventing humans from reading it) for text-mining purposes.
Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK
P.S. The link to the original interview, for anyone who wants to
read my ('Maoist') remarks in the context of the whole
discussion, is:
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2008/01/open-access-interviews-dr-alma-swan.html