[GOAL] COVID-19 and access to knowledge

[Thomas Krichel]

  brentier at uliege.be writes

> In other words - and even if we restrict our thinking to COVID-19 -
> what humankind needs urgently NOW, is an open access to all the
> relevant research literature in a much wider domain than just that
> of this virus.  Very simply, to all the scholarly literature.

  In practice, I doubt that access to current research is such a big
  issue "NOW" as libraries and open access advocates make it appear to
  be. The average academic only reads about one hour a week.  In most
  cases, if you know that a paper exist and who the author is, you can
  contact the author to get the paper. Most authors will comply because
  they crave citations. The open access situation will improve anyway
  as the virus crises in the long run will leave institutions too weak
  to afford the journal subscription folly. 

  There are two other important issues. One is the issue of older
  literature. Its authors are not reachable. JSTOR have locked it up
  behind paywall. They don't get the abuse here that Elsevier gets. A
  fairer spread of abuse would be welcome ;-) We need better archiving
  procedures, and for the RePEc world I'm working on that. 
  
  The other is the problem to stay current with the literature. I mean
  the "know that a paper exist and who the author is" part.
  Fortunately for the biomedical world, it has PubMed and it has me.
  Based on PubMed, I have created "bims: Biomed News"
  http://biomed.news, to address this issue. It's an expertise-sharing
  system powered by human selectors who are aided by sophisticated use
  of machine learning.
 

-- 

  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel                  http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                              skype:thomaskrichel