Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Opening Science

There is a movement to open up the scientific literature for free and public access.  I suppose that many people are surprised that this is even a question. Indeed it is.

{tags: orcmid Just Science open access BOAI self-archiving}

There are many difficulties in shifting the activities of scientists, their institutions, and their support (often involving substantial dependence on public funds) to models that provide for open access to research materials and results.  The Internet and the web make it possible.  There are institutional, commercial, and cultural realms where the breakthrough must actually occur.  It is disruptive, as all breakthroughs are, although the direction of movement is pretty clear.

As an independent scholar and self-styled scientist, I am aware of the self-archiving movement.  I am essentially my own archivist and self-publisher on the Internet.  I am also aware of semi-institutional vehicles, such as arXiv, that provide open access with generously-low barriers to contribution (and some scientific software projects publish their work on SourceForge).  This provides another way to preserve the work of investigators like myself.  (We add the entertainment value that gives spice to crackpot science when we happen to stumble or rush headlong into that particular pitfall.)

In the larger realms of science policy, there are efforts to legislate the public archiving of scientific papers and other results.  In the European Union, the European Commission is being petitioned to mandate public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication.  Obviously, the most effective endorsements will come within the European Union itself. 

I am a bystander.  I won’t cloud the value of the petition by adding my signature.   I do applaud this move toward the opening of science in this broad and internationally-meaningful way.  As a spectator in this particular game, I am proud to wave their banner from my seat high in the back of the North American cheering section:

Signatures of the EC Open Access Petition in support of the European Commission's proposed Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate

posted by orcmid at 2/09/2007 12:31:09 PM