Showing posts with label researchers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label researchers. Show all posts

27 February 2007

Crying into Our Beer

At first blush, this sounds good:

The University of Manchester has secured a £8.4 million deal to become one of the country's largest repositories of facts and figures.

The award by the Economic and Social Research Council will renew the services which are free of charge for researchers and students until 2012. Tens of thousands of people are already using them.

But the clue is "free of charge": we're talking free as in beer, here, people.

So, a missed opportunity here to make this data - precisely the kind of stuff that should be available in an unfettered form - truly free. It makes you want to weep.

02 May 2006

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.