What we may be seeing here is a dichotomy between researchers that can afford to read much of what they have to take in, simply because there isn't an enormous 'overwhelm' of papers in their field, and those who cannot possibly read everything they ought to take in, because they are constantly confronted with precisely such an 'overwhelm' of papers. The latter need to have alternative ways of getting the gist of the information that's being published in their field, even if simply to judge which fraction of the published literature they actually do need to read with their own eyes. Machine-aided techniques, such as text-mining and text-analysis, which can 'ingest' and analyse many more articles than a single human can, are essential in such fields, and only getting more important.
Open Access should not be reserved just for the former class of researchers, the ones who are in a position to read all the literature in their fields with their own eyes. Jan On 9 May 2012, at 16:43, Stevan Harnad wrote: > On Wed, 9 May 2012, Jan Velterop wrote: > >> The real issue is to do with usage rights. > > Usage rights are moot if you don't have access. > >> There may be technical issues to overcome, but there >> is scant reason to overcome those for so-called OA >> articles if text-mining is not allowed. > > Perhaps the reasons are not so scant for all those > researchers who are currently denied access > (irrespective of whether "text-mining is [or is] > not allowed"...). > > Stevan Harnad > _______________________________________________ > GOAL mailing list > GOAL@eprints.org > http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
