Re: Free Access vs. Open Access
Barry Mahon writes The actual technical aspects of the database loading may be irrelevant but there is an important corollorary - secondary information services (abstracting and indexing) play an increasingly important role as the primary literature becomes more and more diffused in the location of its primary publication. These are certainly not free - it costs a lot of money to collect and collate the material, even though a number of the organisations doing this work are non-profit, such as Chemical Abstracts, Inspec, etc. There are free abstract and indexing services around, see CiteSeer, http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs, DBLP, see http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/, for computer science and RePEc, http://repec.org, for economics. I am the principal founder of RePEc and I am in the process of implementing the ideas behind this collection for Computing and Library and Information Science, see http://rclis.org. Not much there yet, though, because such systems take a long time to be produce. BTW, ICSTI will be holding a meeting in January 2004 on the topic of the 'new economic models' The trick is to get the community involed, in that way you minimize cost on a central collection. The RePEc collection illustrates this masterfully. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org visiting CO PAH, Novosibirsk http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Free Access vs. Open Access
Matthew Cockerill writes * The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). The * freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs * (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for * this. * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). * The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. Thank you for pointing this out. I have always held these ideas (as formulated by Richard Stallman) in high esteem. This is where I see the main role of the OAI, as to provide metadata on primary works with which secondary, i.e. abstracting and indexing services can be built, as I pointed out in my presentation to the ALA, http://openlib.org/home/krichel/presentations/toronto_2003-06-22.ppt BioMed Central's policy of Open Access is based on a giving the scientific community a similarly broad freedom to make use of the research articles that we publish. This includes giving access to the structured form of the articles, and giving the right to redistribute and create derivative works from the articles. It will take a long time until the ideas of reusable code will move from the hacker community to the academic community. Part of that time delay comes from the underlying matter, i.e. academic research is not as immediately reusable as object-oriented software code. Another reason for the delay is the social environment. It matters a lot more who has written a research paper than who has written a piece of code. Because of that the open access movement must make sure that the transition to open access is demonstrably rational for each academic, not just collectively rational for the academic community as a whole. This is not a trivial task. We need to have freely-available conventional abstract and indexing data, as well as evaluative data. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org visiting CO PAH, Novosibirsk http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
