Arnold Hirshon, A Diamond in the Rough: Divining the Future of E-Content, Educause Review, January/February 2005. All of Part 3 is on OA. Excerpt: 'Only within the last few years has one of the early dreams for the Web --the ability of the scholarly community to maintain control of its publishing environment-- become possible through advances in technology. This movement has now reached a point where even its chief detractors, the commercial publishers who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, are seeing alternative publishing systems, and open access in particular, as a significant threat to their viability. The open access movement began as an alternative avenue for publishing STM scholarly materials. The key features of this system are that the author (or a grant) pays a one-time fee for publication of the article, with the author retaining copyright. In addition, the publisher usually operates on a nonprofit basis, and the materials become freely available after an initial period (usually about six months) following publication. At least one recent study indicates that open access publications are on the verge of becoming part of the mainstream information channel in scholarly communications....Open access is far from being perfected as a communications medium; it can fulfill its promise only if librarians continue to help it develop. Librarians can foster the growth of open access by encouraging mainstream abstract and indexing services to include articles in open access journals.' (Thanks to Charles W. Bailey, Jr.)
(PS: A few quick replies. First, this formulation focuses on OA journals and overlooks OA archives. Second, OA journals make their content freely available from the start. Only non-OA journals consider compromises like free online access after a six month embargo. Third, librarians are remarkable in their support for OA, and their future support will complement the efforts of other stakeholders, but the only parties indispensable for OA are authors. Fourth, "mainstream abstracting and indexing services" are less important for OA content than for conventional content, since OA content is crawled and indexed by an ever-expanding array of increasingly-sophisticated tools for full-text searching, mining, summarizing, querying, linking, alerting, and many other forms of processing and analysis.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/20/2005 05:48:00 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.
