Defining open access (OA) Open Access (OA) means toll-free Web access. This term would not even need to be coined and defined (since toll-free access is not the exception but the rule for most Web content) if most of OA’s primary target content -- 2.5 million articles yearly, published in the planet’s 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals – weren’t locked behind toll barriers, accessible only to users whose institutions can afford the subscription tolls.
Research impact barriers Even the toll barriers would not necessitate coining a new term for OA (since we are also used to having to pay to access certain commercial digital products, such as movies, video, books, and software) if not for the fact that the creators of those 2.5 million articles (unlike the creators of most commercial movies, etc.) do not seek or receive any royalties: they publish their research not for income but for impact. The productivity and progress of researchers’ careers and of research itself depend not on revenues from the tolls paid to access those articles but on their uptake and usage.
OA self-archiving The PostGutenberg era opened up by the Web holds the promise of removing these obsolete obstacles to research and researchers by removing the toll barriers to access, and hence to impact. All that researchers need to do today is to supplement the access to the official published version of their articles, by self-archiving the final, peer-reviewed draft in their own institution’s OA repository, so users whose institutions cannot afford the publisher’s toll-access version can still access the author’s OA version. OA through author self-archiving is called “Green OA.” If the publisher makes the official online edition OA, that is called “Gold OA.”
Green and gold OA Providing Green OA is in the hands of researchers (and their institutions and funders). Providing Gold OA is in the hands of publishers. Only about 20 percent of peer-reviewed journals have converted to Gold OA, and that does not include most of the top 20 percent of journals that researchers need most. Journals fear losing their subscription revenues. Some Gold OA journals still cover costs out of subscription tolls or subsidies; others charge the author’s institution an article-publishing fee instead of a journal subscription toll. But with institutions overburdened by the inflating costs of the 80 percent of journals still charging subscriptions, they haven’t the extra cash to pay for Gold OA.
The promise and the puzzle Nor do institutions need extra cash. They can have Green OA for free -- if their researchers self-archive. Green OA self-archiving benefits research and researchers, as users (for access) and as authors (for impact). So the promise is there, within the research community’s grasp; just a few minutes’ worth of extra keystrokes per article. The puzzle is that most researchers are not reaching for what is already within their grasp: Only about 20 percent self-archive spontaneously.
"Zeno’s Paralysis" Each of the many worries underlying this puzzle of “Zeno’s Paralysis” is groundless, easily dispelled with a little information and reflection. (Most revolve around misunderstandings about copyright and peer review.) But for at least two decades
now, for every researcher liberated from a groundless worry about self-archiving, at least five more (80 percent) remain uninformed and paralyzed. We could already have had universal Green OA ever since the advent of the Web, if not the Internet itself.
Mandating OA There is a solution, but that too is still being grasped and applied much too slowly by those in the position to ensure that we have universal Green OA, the universal providers of all of OA’s target content, the world’s universities and research institutions (and their funders). Institutions have created OA repositories (with the help of free software, the first of which was EPrints, created in 2000 by the University of Southampton’s Rob Tansley, who went on the create Dspace for MIT). But repositories are not enough. They remain 80 percent empty unless self-archiving is mandated; then, and only then, 95 percent of researchers do self-archive, over 80 percent of them willingly. OA’s considerable rewards are demonstrable: 25 percent to 250 percent more downloads, citations, and other new metrics being developed to measure and reward research impact.
Local advocacy for global OA Over 100 institutions (starting with Southampton, and now including Harvard and MIT) and over 40 research funders (including NIH
and RCUK) have mandated Green OA so far.
There exist about 10,000 universities worldwide; all the dominoes are ready to fall. The news of the practical simplicity of OA's means and the scientific/scholarly (and financial) benefits of OA’s ends just needs to propagate. We now need to do all we can locally to hasten the optimal
and inevitable
outcome globally.
— Stevan Harnad is Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at Université du Québec à Montréal and Professor in Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University, UK.
SFI asked: "10,000 different systems, one run by each university, for OA doesn't seem like an elegant solution. Doesn't the scientific community instead need a single repository for peer reviewed articles, or at least a single one for each discipline?"
Reply: Does 10,000,000 diffeent websites, one tun by each provider, for the web seem like an inelegant solution? Does the online community need a single website for everything, or at least a single one for each topic? -- Or will harvesting by google et al do?
OA, like much else on the Internet and web, is fundamentally a matter of a distributed network of providers plus (multiple) central harvester-service-providers built on them.
Google is not a repository. And we do not need to deposit directly in google.
The new Houghton Report from SPARC is especially timely, counterbalancing its cautious empirical evidence against the data-free rhetoric of those publishers who are trying to oppose the FRPAA and end President Obama's Request for Information on Public Access Policy by arguing that the purpose of funding, conducting and publishing research is to maximize publishers' revenues rather than to maximize the benefits of research to the tax-paying public that funded it.
"Preliminary modeling suggests that over a transitional period of 30 years from implementation, the potential incremental benefits of the proposed FRPAA archiving mandate might be worth around 8 times the costs. Perhaps two-thirds of these benefits would accrue within the US, with the remainder spilling over to other countries. Hence, the US national benefits arising from the proposed FRPAA archiving mandate might be of the order of 5 times the costs."
"How many Gold OA journals are out there today?" 5140 (out of a total of at least 25,000 journals).
"Do they have the same clout as more established journals?" Most of today's top journals are not yet Gold OA journals. And most of today's Gold OA journals are not among the top journals.
But the question misses the point, completely, because: (1) I was writing about Green OA self-archiving of articles published in all journals, whether or not they are Gold. (2) The transition scenario I described is based on universal Green OA first, allowing most of the functions and costs of publishing to be offloaded onto the distributed network of Green OA institutional repositories. (3) If and when universal Green OA induces a transition to Gold OA, all journals, top and bottom will convert, at much reduced total cost, providing peer review only, paid for by the institutional windfall subscription cancellation savings.
Abstract: What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community's access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA.
Yeah, but "published" papers still factor in tenure and pay rates (at certain schools), and once OA is implemented in any form the current publishers are out of business. So you need to replace the "published" part somehow...and the local university site isn't going to cut it.
Not in theory at all. Search over harvested content is practice, and it works. And semantic search has nothing to do with locus of deposit (distributed/harvested or central). [And Boolean inverted full-text search will, I bet, beat most semantic search today (though maybe some future day).]
The thing is, what's missing is not user search power but the target content (2.5 million refereed research journal articles per year across all fields), regardless of locus of deposit. Locus of deposit matters not for search, but for content provision, and in particular, content provision mandates. The universal content providers for OA content are the universities; they need to mandate deposit. And their interest is in local, institutional deposit, not in institution-external deposit,
Yeah that's great in theory, but semantic search would really help. For that you need good meta data that I doubt authors working on local repo's will provide.
Here's the short answer to this frequent, but erroneous worry:
10,000 universities (those that have websites at all) can all be searched and found via google (a central harvester, not a central host). No need for anyone to deposit directly in google.
That's the way it goes, in the distributed, interoperable, harvesting era (the google and google-like era).
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The US National Security Agency learned the hard way that it can be dangerous to give a contractor too much money and access, with too little scrutiny. The NSA and other government agencies hire tens of thousands of contractors
a year to analyze data. Edward Snowden -- who revealed himself as the NSA leaker after fleeing the country -- was one such contractor, reportedly holding a $122,000 salaried position at Booz Allen Hamilton at the time of his departure.
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It was about 10 years ago when a new generation of software-as-a-service (SaaS) alternatives started to gain acceptance and adoption among organizations of all sizes. And it has only been about five years since Amazon Web Services captured the marketplace's attention with Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, which opened the door to a vast array of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings. Now, the third piece of the cloud computing puzzle is beginning to win over organizations seeking to build their own apps: platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
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While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
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Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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