[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions

[Andrew A. Adams]

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going to be superseded when better tools come along, but social science data 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                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
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/