greetings - a few thoughts on this thread: Is an opinion survey to find out whether researchers want open access truly needed at this time? In my opinion, not really - the open letter calling for an establishment of a public library of science, signed by 34,000 researchers worldwide, http://www.plos.org/about/letter.html, followed by the very great many open access initiatives that have taken place in the very near past, are more than sufficient evidence. This is not to say there is no point in another survey - it's just to say that anyone who says that there is no evidence that researchers want open access is simply ignoring the facts.
Congratulations to Martin Frank for having the courage to present his anti-OA views on this forum! Communications, IMHO, work better when the opposing sides actually talk to each other - I would encourage others with these viewpoints to share them. I'd also warmly encourage them to change sides and wholeheartedly embrace OA, too, but that's another matter :) Martin makes the point that faculty may not be fully informed about the potential impact of OA, which would limit the usefulness of an opinion survey at this point. I would agree, but from the opposite perspective. As Stevan Harnad points out, the enhanced impact of open access has been demonstrated, an obvious benefit to researchers. However, from my point of view, the electronic medium combined with the world wide web and open access allows for new, and greatly expanded, uses and benefits of scientific knowledge, which are not yet fully understood, and will not be fully realized for some time. For example, in the recent U.N. sponsored forum on Open Access, Rolf Neth, a German scientist who has worked in the area of medical research in Cherynobyl and Siberia, shares his view that "In our cooperation with Russian colleagues in the field of Leukaemia access - or rather the lack of access - to current research results was always a crucial factor." http://groups.undp.org/read/messages? id=98584#98584. This led to a commitment to OA, and development of the Wilsede Portal to free scientific information. Many researchers will not have thought about the potential of OA to instantaneously provide access to our collective scholarly knowledge to fellow researchers and/or professionals working in the field who are attempting to cope with a humanitarian and/or environmental disaster such as Chernobyl. Raising awareness of this potential, to me, logically comes before asking people whether they think OA is important or not. Which is why, with all due respect to Alma and her need for hard data, I believe it is important to approach OA from a theoretical point of view, and also that qualititave research is needed, not just quantitative. Anecdotal evidence can help. With regards to Barbara's assessment of the need for OA in developing countries, I agree but would like to point out that the analogy of whether a hungry child would like a loaf for $2 or for free, greatly understates the cost of scholarly information as provided by subscription or on a pay-per- use basis. Even on a pay-per-use basis, costs per article tend to be range from around $10 U.S. per article and up. Since scholarly knowledge is not built on the reading of single articles, the price for the hungry child might be best expressed as rather more than the family's total annual income. The HINARI and AGORA programs do mitigate against these extremely high prices for some information, for some of the world's poorest peoples, of course. OA, however, has the potential to work this way with all of our scholarly information, for everyone, not just some people. best, Heather Morrison Project Coordinator BC Electronic Library Network [email protected] 604-268-7001 Fax: 604-291-3023 WAC Bennett Library 8888 University Drive Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6
