[GOAL] Bold predictions for 2012

[Arthur Sale]

Richard, you asked what we'd like to see in 2012.

 

I'd like to see more open access journals, and higher prestige attached to
those that already exist.  Who wouldn't?  I'd also like to see more ID/OA
mandated institutional repositories. Again who wouldn't?  But I don't see
either strategy as taking Open Access to the tipping point where a scholarly
revolution becomes unstoppable. Why? Because both strategies are too
cerebral, too argumentative, too technological, and they require at present
unnatural actions on the part of researchers.

 

What I want to predict is a growing number of researchers doing completely
natural things that have always been in their repertoire of work, for
example like keeping a lifetime record of their publications and ephemera.
It used to be a collection of paper, but the social media tools like
Mendeley now allow this to be electronic, and like the silent transition
from typewriters to the admittedly superior word processing software, I
predict we will see a silent transition to online in-the-cloud corpus
collections. Making this open access is technologically trivial, and I have
named this the Titanium Road to open access: light-weight, strong, robust
and recognises what people actually do.

 

If I can make another prediction, I think that 2012 might just be the year
that we begin to question the copyright position of articles. Despite legal
transfer of copyright (sometimes) most publishers pay only lip-service to
their 'ownership' and carry out minimal due diligence in their 'purchase' in
return for services, and researchers respond with total indifference by
dispensing copies of the Version-of-Record as they see fit. Never a week
goes by when I do not see someone post to a list "Can anyone send me a copy
of Xxx by Yyy in journal Zzz?" and it appears they almost always are
satisfied by their later posts of effusive thanks. The law in respect of
scholarly articles has to change, and this might be the year that we begin
to see cracks open up.

 

Finally, let me make my last prediction - that 2012 might see us begin to
address the issue of China, and the language barriers that look like being a
major part of the OA spectrum in this decade (2011-2020). The
English-speaking world and the European language speaking world have been
happy to live with English as the lingua franca (what a strange misnomer!),
but the Asian-speaking world is not likely to be so accommodating. We shall
have to begin to treat open access as a matter involving automatic
translation, at first maybe just for metadata, but later for the whole
article.

 

Richard, you said you'd like to see short posts dominate this list, so I've
been brief to the point of encryption. I am happy to expand on any of the
previous four paragraphs, recognising that some of them are separable
issues. I hope I have been controversial enough to get some responses.

 

Arthur Sale

University of Tasmania, Australia

 

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