Showing posts with label memex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memex. Show all posts

01 October 2006

ArXiv from the Horse's Mouth

It can be argued that arXiv is one of the two main wellsprings of the open access movement. This makes an article by Dr arXiv himself, Paul Ginsparg, of particular interest.

Wittily entitled "As We May Read" - a reference to Vannevar Bush's famous "As We May Think" paper - it provides a good explanation of how arXiv works, and why the open access revolution is likely to be completed sooner rather than later. And he makes an interesting point:

A form of open access appears to be happening by a backdoor route: using standard search engines, more than one-third of the high-impact journal articles in a sample of biological/medical journals published in 2003 were found at nonjournal Web sites (Wren, 2005).

He concludes:

On the one-decade time scale, it is likely that more research communities will join some form of global unified archive system without the current partitioning and access restrictions familiar from the paper medium, for the simple reason that it is the best way to communicate knowledge and hence to create new knowledge. Ironically, it is also possible that the technology of the 21st century will allow the traditional players from a century ago, namely the professional societies and institutional libraries, to return to their dominant role in support of the research enterprise.

(Via Open Access News.)