Peter Suber's Purview

One source that crops up more than most in these blog posts is that of Open Access News. This is simply the best place to go for information about open access activity. But its creator, Peter Suber, does more than offer a handy one-stop shop for such news: he performs the equally important task of pulling together disparate pieces of information, to create a whole larger than the parts.

A case in point is this wonderful "raft" of blogger comments on the imminent FUD campaign against open access, where Peter kindly includes my own witterings on the subject. Reading this bundle of blog rage warms the cockles of my heart; it also offers a handy reminder of the moral and intellectual energy ranged against the retrograde forces of the anti-open access bloc.

First Open Access Journal on Open Access

It seems hard to believe, but if Peter Suber, Mr Open Access, says so, it must be true:

Open Access Research is a new peer-reviewed OA journal sponsored by the Georgia State University Library. It's the first peer-reviewed journal devoted to OA itself.

Digital Library of the Commons

OnTheCommons has an interesting post about a new book called Understanding Knowledge as a Commons. This sounds great - see Peter Suber's comment below for details on open access to its contents. but sadly - and ironically - seems not to be open access (though I'd bet that Peter Suber's contribution to the collection is doubtless available somewhere),. However, tThis article did mention something I'd not come across before: the Digital Libary of the Commons.

This turns out to be a wonderful resource:

a gateway to the international literature on the commons. This site contains an author-submission portal; an archive of full-text articles, papers, and dissertations; the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons; a Keyword Thesaurus, and links to relevant reference sources on the study of the commons.

Among the list of commons areas, there is Information and Knowledge Commons:

anticommons, copyright, indigenous, local, scientific knowledge issues, intellectual property rights, the Internet, libraries, patents, virtual commons, etc.

Strange that free software is not included. But good, nonetheless.

Open Science or Free Science?

The open science meme is rather in vogue at the moment. But Bill Hooker raises an interesting point (in a post that kindly links to a couple items on this blog):

should we be calling the campaign to free up scientific information (text, data and software) "Free Science", for the same reasons Stallman insists on "Free Software"?

Interestingly, there is another parallel here:

Just as free software gained the alternative name "open source" at the Freeware Summit in 1998, so free open scholarship (FOS), as it was called until then by the main newsletter that covered it - written by Peter Suber, professor of philosophy at Earlham College - was renamed "open access" as part of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in December 2001. Suber's newsletter turned into Open Access News and became one of the earliest blogs; it remains the definitive record of the open access movement, and Suber has become its semi-official chronicler (the Eric Raymond of open access - without the guns).

OA Book on OA from OA Publisher

As the Digg lot say, "title says it all" - or nearly: worth noting too that this open access book on open access comes from a publisher that provides open access to all its titles. (Via Open Access News.)

EU OSS for OA

Here's the EU and International Atomic Energy Authority trumpeting all sorts of stuff, including the fact that the former's Joint Research Centre:

has developed software which monitors a wide range of open access sources such as news articles, research papers, reports and satellite images.

The ever-perceptive Peter Suber comments:

I'd like to see the EU make the software public and open the source code. I'm assuming it works with a separable database of cues and sources relevant to nuclear non-proliferation, which could remain classified. The software was developed at public expense, has general utility, and could serve another urgent public purpose: accelerating scientific research. It wouldn't be the only text-mining application around, but I'm assuming that the IAEA wouldn't have chosen it unless it had some strengths missing from other packages. The public gains when new tools and access policies make public research more useful than it already is --and OA benefits when new tools give authors and publishers an extra incentive to make their work OA.

Bill Gates Wants to Share "Openly"

It looks like Bill Gates is one step closer to getting it. According to this press release from his foundation, regarding a major research grant to create a series of research consortia to accelerate HIV vaccine development:

These consortia will be linked to five central laboratories and data analysis facilities, enabling investigators to openly share data and compare results, and allowing the most promising vaccine approaches to be quickly prioritized for further development.

...

As a condition for receiving funding, the newly-funded vaccine discovery consortia have agreed to use the central facilities to test vaccine candidates, share information with other investigators, and compare results using standardized benchmarks.

In other words, Gates is demanding open data sharing, and maybe open access too (it's not clear yet, as Peter Suber notes).

But this is a slippery slope, Bill: once you accept the inherent efficiency of sharing data "openly", as the press release emphasises, it's only a short conceptual leap before you find yourself accepting and then encouraging the other ways of sharing stuff "openly"....

Open Access... as Haiku

If you don't have time to read through Peter Suber's full explanation of open access, you could always try his haiku version (this isn't new, but I've only just come across it). A sample:

I love print, paper.
But I love searching, linking,
using, sharing more.

...

They don't pay authors,
editors or referees.
Then they want the rights.

...

Sure, change copyright
and peer review. But OA
doesn't have to wait.

Open Access: How Not to Be Clueful

This paper, with the title "Open Access" and its Social Context: New Colonialism in the Making? has to take the biscuit for one of the least clueful analyses of the idea of open access. With admirable restraint Peter Suber demolishes the painful misconceptions this chap seems to be labouring under.

But I prefer to direct your gaze to the following pearls of wisdom:

Thus granting "open access" to information through technical devices and social removal of "access limits" leads to re-construction of such barriers within the individual. There is no alternative: in order to use his or her intellectual capacities to their best, the reader needs to move from having access to using the access. Researchers are increasingly developing strategies for not paying attention to uninteresting or currently unusable sources and may block access to the external sources that try to persuade them that something new is of interest. Thus, the socio-economic result of the "open access" to scientific knowledge may give way not to more uses of that availability but to new forms of elimination of the functional uses of the materials. Instead of not having funds to subscribe to all relevant journals the inaccessibility comes out of one's own mental processing capacity and its limitations. Here of course new technologies cannot help—and need not—since the issue at stake is not the number of articles read but new ideas generated by reading and thinking.

Or, put another way:

With open access, people are able to choose what they read, and then decide whether or not they agree with the ideas they encounter.

Shocking, positively shocking.

Why Open Access Makes Sense

There are lots of moral reasons why academics should support open access. But there is also an extremely strong pragmatic one: their work is more widely read, and their institutions gain in visibility and hence prestige.

Open access? - You'd be daft not to.

Update. Peter Suber has kindly sent me this link to a huge bibliography of studies that demonstrate the benefits of open access in even more detail.

Open Access Opens the Throttle

It's striking that, so far, open access has had a relatively difficult time making the breakthrough into the mainstream - despite the high-profile example of open source to help pave the way. Whether this says something about institutional inertia, or the stubbornness of the forces ranged against open access, is hard to say.

Against this background, a post (via Open Access News) on the splendidly-named "The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics" blog (now why couldn't I have thought of something like that?) is good news.

Figures from that post speak for themselves:
In the last quarter, over 780,000 records have been added to OAIster, suggesting that those open access archives are beginning to fill! There are 170 more titles in DOAJ, likely an understated increase due to a weeding project. 78 titles have been added to DOAJ in the past 30 days, a growth rate of more than 2 new titles per day.

OAIster refers to a handy central search site for "freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources", while DOAJ is a similarly-indispensable directory of open access journals. The swelling holdings of both augur well for open access, and offer the hope that the breakthrough may be close.

Update: An EU study on the scientific publishing market comes down squarely in favour of open access. As Peter Suber rightly notes, "this is big", and is likely to give the movement a considerable boost.

Searching for an Answer

I have always been fascinated by search engines. Back in March 1995, I wrote a short feature about the new Internet search engines - variously known as spiders, worms and crawlers at the time - that were just starting to come through:

As an example of the scale of the World-Wide Web (and of the task facing Web crawlers), you might take a look at Lycos (named after a spider). It can be found at the URL http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/. At the time of writing its database knew of a massive 1.75 million URLs.

(1.75 million URLs - imagine it.)

A few months later, I got really excited by a new, even more amazing search engine:

The latest pretender to the title of top Web searcher is called Alta Vista, and comes from the computer manufacturer Digital. It can be found at http://www.altavista.digital.com/, and as usual costs nothing to use. As with all the others, it claims to be the biggest and best and promises direct access to every one of 8 billion words found in over 16 million Web pages.

(16 million pages - will the madness never end?)

My first comment on Google, in November 1998, by contrast, was surprisingly muted:

Google (home page at http://google.stanford.edu/) ranks search result pages on the basis of which pages link to them.

(Google? - it'll never catch on.)

I'd thought that my current interest in search engines was simply a continuation of this story, a historical relict, bolstered by the fact that Google's core services (not some of its mickey-mouse ones like Google Video - call that an interface? - or Google Finance - is this even finished?) really are of central importance to the way I and many people now work online.

But upon arriving at this page on the OA Librarian blog, all became clear. Indeed, the title alone explained why I am still writing about search engines in the context of the opens: "Open access is impossible without findability."

Ah. Of course.

Update: Peter Suber has pointed me to an interesting essay of his looking at the relationship between search engines and open access. Worth reading.

Beyond Parallel Universes

One of the themes of this blog is the commonality between the various opens. In a piece I wrote for the excellent online magazine LWN.net, I've tried to make some of the parallels between open source and open access explicit - to the point where I set up something of a mapping between key individuals and key moments (Peter Suber at Open Access News even drew a little diagram to make this clearer).

My article tries to look at the big picture, largely because I was trying to show those in the open source world why they should care about open access. At the end I talk a little about specific open source software that can be used for open access. Another piece on the Outgoing blog (subtitle: "Library metadata techniques and trends"), takes a closer look at a particular kind of such software, that for repositories (where you can stick your open access materials).

This called forth a typically spirited commentary from Stevan Harnad, which contains a link to yet more interesting words from Richard Poynder, a pioneering journalist in the open access field, with a blog - called "Open and Shut" (could there be a theme, here?) - that is always worth taking a look at. For example, he has a fascinating interview on the subject of the role of open access in the humanities.

Poynder rightly points out that there is something a contradiction in much journalistic writing about open access, in that it is often not accessible itself (even my LWN.net piece was subscribers-only for a week). And so he's bravely decided to conduct a little experiment by providing the first section of a long essay, and then asking anyone who reads it - it is freely accessible - and finds it useful to make a modest donation. I wish him well, though I fear it may not bring him quite the income he is hoping for.

Open Business on Open Content

Once more, the indispensable Open Access News takes me somewhere I didn't know I wanted to go. This time it's to a site called Open Business. According to its home page:

OpenBusiness is a platform to share and develop innovative Open Business ideas - entrepreneurial ideas which are built around openness, free services and free access. The two main aims of the project are to build an online resource of innovative business models, ideas and tools, and to publish an OpenBusiness Guidebook.

At the moment it seems to be another tripod, with legs in the UK, Brazil and South Africa. Its basic form is a blog, topped off with a dash of wiki.

The link that brought me here led to an interview with Esther Dyson. I have to confess that I tend to find her a little, er, light, shall we say? But this interview was an exception, and she had some interesting background to give on Del.icio.us, in which she was an angel investor.

I'm still not entirely clear what the site is doing - either strategically or structurally - but it has pointers to stuff I wasn't aware of, so it gets brownie points for that if for nothing else. One to return to.