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Re: Correcting Stevan Harnad's Misrepresentation
Bernie,
I had in mind things I have written about before, both in posts
to this list and in an article (cited more than once on this
list) entitled "Open Access 2.0"
(http://journalofelectronicpublishing.org). So my comments here
add nothing new.
The "follow-through" question is being addressed by a number of
people in different ways. For example, there are investigations
into essential infrastructure for developing countries to make
even free or open access material useful. (E.g., what good is
open access if a population is illiterate?) But broad social and
political analyses are outside my area of expertise. My own
focus has been on aspects of media.
Simply making information available doesn't do very much--or what
it will be required to do will become increasingly demanding in
the coming years. Content has to be accessible in some way (a
library subscription is one way, OA another: the issues apply to
both OA and toll-access publications), but it also has to be
discoverable. Thus, publishers of all stripes have to be
sensitive to varyious indexing tools, of which search engines are
of growing prominence. This leads to the need for search-engine
optimization, which is not uniformly or energetically practiced
by publishers.
Content must also be designed to be embedded in an ongoing
discussion. In the technical world, this is the arena of Web 2.0
applications. Here again look at academic publications and ask
whether their software platforms enable even a fraction of what
any young person takes for granted on a consumer service like
FaceBook. No doubt conversations take place even in the absence
of an enabling platform, but why would we not want all commentary
to be available in the precincts of the original article? The
notion that this technology is cheap or easy is mind-boggling to
anyone who spends time with professional software developers.
(Or, as a talented engineer I know put it, it may be cheap, but
it isn't easy.)
Content must also be mapped against all other content. This is
harder to do (Google's otherwise outstanding technology doesn't
do this), but it is now coming within range. Personally, I would
like to be able to sign up for an automated service that queries
a huge database of content on the economics of media by inputting
every abstract of new material, delivering a visual
representation of how each new article compares to preexisting
material--right to my desktop or mobile phone. (Google has a 32
word limitation for queries. Abstracts are longer than that.)
The key is that the service would he automated; I wouldn't have
to take the time to find the abstracts and paste in the queries.
Content must also be preserved in a way that makes it perpetually
discoverable. There are many specialists in library preservation
on this list and I will thus limit my comment to remarking that
few people I have spoken to believe that we have taken all the
proper steps to ensure long-term access.
This list can go on and on. In my view, there are two broad
strategies. We could put our resources into addressing some of
these very challenging questions of follow-through for the huge
amounts of academic content currently available under the
toll-access regime, or we could expend resources on the marginal
expansion of access prior to investing in the follow-through.
Establishing these priorities is important, but the discussion to
date has seemed limited and, to be frank, not at the level one
would expect from any other area of academic investigation.
(Yes, another pointer to myself: "Putting Science into Science
Publishing" at
http://pubfrontier.com/2007/12/11/putting-science-into-science-publishing.)
The NIH, the Wellcome Trust, the Harvard faculty, and many other
organizations--and, of course, Stevan Harnad--have already
reached their conclusions.
Joe Esposito
----- Original Message -----
From: "B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2@yahoo.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>; <espositoj@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 3:45 PM
Subject: Re: Correcting Stevan Harnad's Misrepresentation
> Joe Esposito says:
>
> "What is really needed in the research community is not open access but
> 'open access follow-through.'"
>
> I'm not quite sure what "open access follow-through" entails. Maybe Joe
> could explain?
>
> Bernie Sloan
> Sora Associates
> Bloomington, IN