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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-AU link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>Richard, you asked what we’d like to see in 2012.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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 <i>Titanium Road to open access</i>: light-weight, strong, robust and recognises what people actually do.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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 <i>lingua franca</i> (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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Arthur Sale<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>University of Tasmania, Australia<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></body></html>