The Future of Science is Open (excellent series on open access to information)

[BurtWorm]

from 3QuarksDaily.com. By Bill Hooker. The selection below is from Part I of what looks to be a three part series. The second part is available here. Very interesting topic. Here's where the counterculture is now, it seems.

http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2006/10/the_future_of_s_1.html

A personal example
I have yet to publish any data here in the US, but I published a dozen or so articles while I was at the University of Queensland. More than half of these are not freely available from the journals in which they were published (J Clin Virol, Virology, Biochim Biophys Acta, Mol Biochem Parasitol, Acta Tropica -- all Elsevier journals, pfui! -- and Rev Med Virol from Wiley InterScience). I couldn't find any full-text copies online using Google Scholar or PubMed, either. You cannot read these seven papers of mine without paying a fee (usually around $30) or physically going to a library which carries (and has therefore paid for) the journal and issue in question. Neither can my professional colleagues, unless their institution happens to subscribe to the journal or some package which includes it; these subscription fees are commonly extortionate (Elsevier being a particularly egregious offender).

For you as a taxpayer, this means that you are denied access to information you've already paid for (since I've always been funded by government grants). For me as a scientist, it means that more than half of my life's work to date is, while not useless, certainly of much less use to the world than it might be. Given that a large part of why I do what I do is that I want to leave the world a better place than I found it, that is simply not acceptable to me. Fortunately, according to RoMEO, all of the journals concerned allow postprint archiving by authors, so I might be able to rescue it. Searching for "queensland" in DOAR (one of a number of such directories) leads me to ePrints UQ, so there is a relevant archive for me to use, but there's a catch: you have to be a current UQ staff member to deposit. I can (and will) talk to David Harrich, my boss at the time, about archiving all of our HIV papers, since Dave is still at UQ. My schistosomiasis papers, though, have no one on the author lists who could deposit them, so I'll have to contact the staff at ePrints UQ and see whether there's a way for ex-staff to deposit articles. If there isn't, I'll have to either find another repository that will take the articles, or make one of my own. Since my current employers don't have an institutional repository, I'm going to have to make that choice anyway for upcoming papers. Both arXiv and Cogprints will take biology papers, although mine don't seem to fit into any of their categories, and Peter Suber has mentioned building a Universal Repository in collaboration with the Internet Archive, but I'm not sure if anything has come of that endeavour. That leaves me with the option of building my own archive, for the purposes of which there are numerous open-source software packages available. Alternatively, at least as a first step, I could simply upload the papers to my own webspace somewhere and try to make sure the the Internet Archive and Google Scholar know about them, so that they would be available though not interoperable with other repositories. Finally, there's one last catch: Elsevier won't let me use their pdf versions, and I don't have the original files in most instances. So whatever I do, I'm going to have to track down the published versions and then reverse-engineer an "unofficial" version.

Why would I go to all this trouble? Because OA offers significant benefits and advantages to a variety of stakeholders....