Peter, You're talking about a very narrow subset of science here. I'm talking about all of academic scholarship that is published in journals. Yes, the stuff you're talking about is a small minority of academic research. A quick search seems to show that much of Crystallography is open access. That's great for crystallographers. They're on the ball, clearly. But so few others are!
Would I like scholarship to be better done (including science)? Oh my word, yes. But I don't think we're going to get everyone quickly to revise their approaches. We've seen twenty years of trying to get other fields to sort themselves out as HE Physics did and as Crystallography appears to have done. How many other fields have done this? How many people are arguing for it in those fields, how many wasted years are we seeing? I run across basic barriers of access to my own research needs day in and day out, as do my students. What I primarily need access to is papers, not large datasets. Large datasets in my areas of research are limited and nowhere near as universal as the physical sciences (well-done crystallography data is only going to be superseded when better tools come along, but social science data sets are highly time and culture-dependent, while practical computer science results are often outmoded every eighteen months by Moore's Law). If I could get the ACM, the IEEE, the IET to open all their papers held in well-developed digital libraries, I would do so. I do argue for them to do so and they're slowly moving in this direction (ACM at least, the one I'm most involved with). But it's slow and they're only a minority (albeit a large one) of CS literature and that leaves out the psychology, sociology. It sounds to me like the reason that you keep arguing for better data mining access on papers is because in your field that actual access to the raw data and the individual's access to papers (a quick search on crystallography revealed few barriers, although since I'm at work I'm not sure how many are invisible to me because of my work IP address). You're in a privileged position if this is so. Partly because my work is so interdisciplinary, I see the access barriers every day. About half the papers on my hard drive are OA versions. I can access far fewer than half of the papers I'd like to see because they're neither open access nor inside a subscription that my university pays for. So, Peter, when was the last time you wanted personal access to a paper to read it (not so that you could data mine it, but so that you could just read it with your own eyeballs) and couldn't get it? How often does this happen to you? What proportion of the papers you'd like to read are unavailable to you? Has what the crystallographers done been good? From the looks of it, it's great. But I can't get other fields to do it, because I'm not inside them, and since very few of them are showing significant movements in the right direction, I'm persuaded that we have to come at this from a different angle - funders and institutions. If we can get them to work together, then we can get the majority of papers open. That7s the first step, but only the first step, you're right. But once that first step has been taken the rest, I believe, will become much much easier to take. Otherwise we're back to finding people passionate enough to push through openness in every single discipline and most disciplines are nowhere near as cohesive as HE Physics and Crystallography. -- Professor Andrew A Adams [email protected] Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
