Here's a development in OA that might be considered, well, a little leftfield: Greg Restall has submitted an RSS feed of the metadata of his research opus to iTunes, to enable interested parties to locate and download the full text of his articles....Although Greg admits that "using iTunes in this way is just a bit of a joke", this is an interesting (and, in some quarters perhaps, alarming) development of the self-archiving idea....
For example, this reader is already suggesting that all journal articles should be thus distributed, thereby saving users from having to pay to access research....[But this] reader is confusing availability of metadata in iTunes with free availability of full text....[His] suggestion that publishers "rethink their distribution" and take advantage of iTunes misses the pretty obvious point that publishers already distribute their metadata widely, and via more appropriate, and in some cases more accessible, channels (think, for example, PubMed, which is freely available and, unlike iTunes, doesn't require you to have a plugin to use it).
Ultimately, of course, this is not a new issue. If a publisher is "green", i.e. allows authors to self-archive their papers for open access, then iTunes is just another potential self-archiving channel. What Greg's use of iTunes, and the responses it provoked, highlight is the lack of awareness of existing repositories amongst many of those who are best placed to use them, and perhaps also an underlying need for greater repository functionality, to help users quickly locate, collate and share relevant research.
We've been mulling over the implications of this, and had some ideas about what repositories could usefully do that might encourage increased usage by publishers [if, like iTunes, we didn't insist on OA]....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/26/2006 11:21:00 AM.
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.
