brent...@uliege.be writes > In other words - and even if we restrict our thinking to COVID-19 - > what humankind needs urgently NOW, is an open access to all the > relevant research literature in a much wider domain than just that > of this virus. Very simply, to all the scholarly literature.
In practice, I doubt that access to current research is such a big issue "NOW" as libraries and open access advocates make it appear to be. The average academic only reads about one hour a week. In most cases, if you know that a paper exist and who the author is, you can contact the author to get the paper. Most authors will comply because they crave citations. The open access situation will improve anyway as the virus crises in the long run will leave institutions too weak to afford the journal subscription folly. There are two other important issues. One is the issue of older literature. Its authors are not reachable. JSTOR have locked it up behind paywall. They don't get the abuse here that Elsevier gets. A fairer spread of abuse would be welcome ;-) We need better archiving procedures, and for the RePEc world I'm working on that. The other is the problem to stay current with the literature. I mean the "know that a paper exist and who the author is" part. Fortunately for the biomedical world, it has PubMed and it has me. Based on PubMed, I have created "bims: Biomed News" http://biomed.news, to address this issue. It's an expertise-sharing system powered by human selectors who are aided by sophisticated use of machine learning. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
