Open Access News

Richard Poynder, A Conversation with Microsoft's Tony Hey, Open and Shut?  December 12, 2006.  This is another of Richard's wonderfully long, detailed interviews.  Even the subset directly on OA is too long to excerpt here.  So read the whole thing for Tony Hey's take on data sharing, open source code and licensing, open standards, the need for OA, the need for pragmatism and compromise in advancing OA, what Microsoft has to gain by supporting OA, and Microsoft's role in developing Portable PubMed Central, the NLM DTD, and the Windows version of EPrints.  Excerpt:

After thirty years as an academic at the UK's Southampton University, and four years in charge of the UK's e-Science Programme, last year Tony Hey surprised everyone by accepting a post as corporate vice president for technical computing at Microsoft.

Below Hey explains to Richard Poynder why he took the job, and why he believes his decision to do so is good news for the global research community and good news for the Open Access Movement....

RP: You support Open Access?

TH: I'm passionate about Open Access.

RP: That makes sense. The premise of e-Science, presumably, is that scientific information needs to be freely available?

TH: Indeed. As I said, the key part of the cyberinfrastructure — although it is not always mentioned — is not so much the network and the middleware, but enabling Open Access, both to the scientific literature and to scientific data. So yes, the assumption is that there will need to be some form of Open Access. This, however, is now inevitable, and you can see it beginning to happen [e.g. with FRPAA in the US]....There is also an EU proposal, and a number of initiatives from the UK Research Councils. And of course The Wellcome Trust has already introduced a self-archiving mandate. So it is only a matter of time....

RP: Microsoft is committed to facilitating Open Access as part of its mission of helping to build the infrastructure for e-Science then?

TH: We are certainly helping. And, as I said, while I didn't expect it when I joined the company, I was amazed to discover that Microsoft was already supporting Open Access....

RP: How then do we characterise what Microsoft can bring to e-Science, and to Open Access?

TH: Microsoft can make these things more easy to use, and provided it does that in an interoperable way, and in a way that doesn’t get up the nose of the community, that is good for everyone....

RP: And how do you see Microsoft helping in the Open Access space?

TH: We've discussed some of the things we are doing. In addition, I have been working with the Mellon Foundation, with Herbert Van de Sompel, and with Carl Lagoze, looking at how we can create interoperable repositories that are searchable at a more fundamental level than is currently possible with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and using Dublin Core....

I am also hoping to work with the publishers, and with the Open Access community, to see if we can find out what is wanted on campuses....For that reason I am talking to people like Nature, and I am trying to do a project with Wiley, looking at Open Access, and looking at new business models that are not so unfair on universities.

PS:  Another reason to read Richard's original is to get active links.  Adobe makes it incredibly difficult to copy linked phrases without dropping the links or even to go back and copy the URLs separately for hand-coding.