On 11/02/2009 21:37, "Klaus Graf" <[email protected]> wrote:
> The short email conversation says nothing on CREAM OF SCIENCE. Don't > confuse DARE and Cream of Science which is a subset of DARE. > > "Cream of Science showcases prominent research from the Netherlands. > The website lists the names of 217 top Dutch academics, providing > worldwide access to their 48,559 publications. About 60% of these can > be accessed full text. These full-text publications are a subset of > NARCIS and DAREnet." > > 60 % is a very high rate. It was a project which has shown that the > leading scholars of a small European countries support OA. That's the > fact. If DARE is unable to learn from the CoS experience then this > isn't an argument against CoS. The discussion at the time, regarding the content of both DAREnet and that of Cream of Science, was not about the proportion that is full-text, but about the fact that it is mostly legacy material. Indeed, CoS set out to capture the life's work of those 200 top Dutch scientists, and did it magnificently well. Leo acknowledged then that it was not possible to produce a figure for the proportion of NEW publications that appear in either CoS or the DAREnet collection, whether full-text or not, and we still don't have that figure today. Whilst older material is nice to have, the focus for Open Access is to make CURRENT research results freely available. The aim of Open Access, which seems to have escaped in the excitement of this debate, is to help science progress optimally by ensuring the unimpeded movement of scientific information around research community. CoS is a great collection, but even if 100% of the CoS documents are full-text, if most those texts are 5-, 10-, 20-, 30-years old they are probably not going to make much of a difference to scientific progress this week. In this digital age, scientists should be able to see their peers' results as soon as they are ready for publication, in order to build upon them at once. Artificial delay built into the system is an anachronism. Alma Swan Key Perspectives Ltd Truro, UK
