Free Global Virtual Scientific Library 113
Several readers wrote in with news of the momentum gathering behind free access to government-funded research. A petition "to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe" garnered more than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural organizations from around the world. The European Commission responded by committing more than $100 million towards support for open access journals and for the building of infrastructure needed to house institutional repositories able to store the millions of academic articles written each year. In the article Michael Geist discusses the open access movement and its critics.
Re:That's great! (Score:2, Interesting)
price has little to do with reliability (Score:4, Interesting)
Peer review has little to do with the price of the publications. Referees are not paid by the publisher of the journal (I know this because I've refereed a bunch of papers and never got anything more than a "thank you" note.)
There are enormous price differences between peer-reviewed journals. Some first-class journals in computer science, such as the Journal of the ACM, cost about 200 a year, while some other journals cost as much as 5000. The difference is that the former are published by nonprofits (scientific or technical societies) while the latter are published by for-profit entities, who charge universities through their nose.
A solution, yet unimplemented, would be to have editorial boards read and validate articles that are published on sites such as arXiv.org
Repeat: what's important is the editorial board, not the publisher.
(Shameless plug: the French research agency CNRS has a nice site for open publication: http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/index.php?langue=
Re:Library purpose (Score:2, Interesting)
That said, libraries exist mainly as government-funded entities here in the US. And, when you think about it, government agencies by-and-large don't actually produce things themselves -- they primarily exist as subsidizing entities: they have a mission and a budget, and "contract out" to the private sector, whether it's building spaceships, tanks, spying on would-be terrorists (or you and me), or stocking libraries.
One of many problems that libraries are encountering, I think, is that open source technologies -- and information outlets -- sort of violate the long-standing tradition of government=subsidizer. There have been some attempts (R-Santorum, as I recall) who tried to limit NOAA from offering any weather service that competed with the private sector (Google the specifics). I wonder if there's some political pushing that wants to prevent libraries from treading on their vendors' bandwagons also. This is very problematic, since we're in a post-industrial era, and practically any service you offer potentially treads on someone else's interest in offering the same service -- but with a price tag.
I'm now middle-age, and worked in public libraries 11 years before my current gig at a large university. I've seen (and assisted) libraries go from card catalog to fully automated, to (slowly but surely) private database subsidizers. It's the Y and Z generations that will need to really hammer this one out. Your chief challenge will be to change the nonsense model that requires tax/tuition-funded faculty to publish in closed venues, relinquish many of their rights, and the citizens/students are forced to buy back the same rights. It's dead model. The etymology of "publish" means "to make public". Today's dynamic is quite the reverse, sort of the anti-publishing industry, setting up protected access barriers more so than conquering them. Ponder this carefully.
The other thing to keep in mind is that academic is "one of the last great medieval institutions" as an IT consultant I once worked with at the University termed it. I worry that they are antagonistic toward sources like the Wikipedia for all the wrong reasons. If you think about it carefully, professors grade papers based on (a) the accuracy of the information the student presents and (b) how well the student properly cited his/her sources. If the information was correct, why should it matter whether it was his astrophysicist neighbor (personal communications are citable sources), textbook A, research paper B, a ridiculously expensive database that the university had to subscribe to, or some free source of information?
I think I know the answer, but simply knowing it won't help matters at all. It'll entail a change of guard -- so it's up to the under-40 crowd to figure this one out, and when they become the next generation of library managers, university administrators, and IT directors suggesting that libraries might become Wikipedia mirrors (hint, hint) and contributors, things may then begin to iron out on their own.