Tamara Zemlo of the Science Advisory Board surveyed scientists on the greatest obstacle to searching online research literature. Quoting today's press release: "Almost 80% of the 1,400 respondents stated that limited access to full-text documents was the most annoying aspect of online literature searches. It far exceeded the other complaints of broken hypertext links, copyright restrictions and inadequate search engines. Such sentiments will be sweet music to the ears of Public Library of Science (PLoS) founders who espouse the philosophy that unrestricted access to scientific and medical literature will accelerate progress in these critical fields. Their model of offering full-text and data of published research article --available free of charge anywhere in the world-- is still being tested.. Time will tell whether the scientists, who in theory embrace the nobility of this idea, will choose to publish their own findings in such a venue." (PS: The site gives no details on the date or method of the survey.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/20/2004 07:25:00 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.
