Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
wonder that the journal publishing industry is so keen to refute the
potential benefits of 'green' OA. Nonetheless, it would seem that the
future will provide increasing amounts of literature openly available.
Copyright has been a barrier in the past, but now around 80-90% of
publication channels allow authors to deposit papers on their own
websites or in a repository after an embargo period following publication
in a journal. Some journal publishers have gone further;
Nature
, for
example, does not demand copyright from its authors but merely a
licence to publish, leaving copyright with the authors or their institutions.
Publishers also recognize that universities want to showcase their research
outputs, and some are already offering universities metadata, so that
institutional repositories can point to articles that are on the publishers'
websites. This has the advantage, from the publishers' point of view, of
allowing institutional repositories bibliographic information and
metadata, while firmly keeping control of the PDF versions of articles.
However, a more ordered future might see publishers and academia
using technology to widen access to scholarly material and innovating
scholarly discourse.
For example, some publishers have been fast to seize the
opportunities provided by social networking and Web 2.0 technologies
and have moved into that space themselves. Nature Publishing Group
launched one of the first scientific social networking sites with Nature
Network in 2007. This site allows scientists to build networks of
contacts and talk about research and scientific issues; its functionality
includes blogs and interactive forums for the exchange of ideas. The
Royal Society of Chemistry has recently acquired ChemSpider, an OA
online database of structure-searchable chemical information, which
allows researchers to collaborate and share data. Nature Network and
ChemSpider are free to use, and allow their publishers to engage in a
radically new way with customers and communities of scientists. In a
world of globalization, Web 2.0 technologies perhaps provide scholars
with a means of personal contact that they have not had since the early
learned societies of the 17th century, when communication between
scholars depended on the attendance of meetings rather than
communication through publication (Wells, 1999).
The debate about OA looks set to roll on for many years and this is
not surprising, given the business at stake. As Steven Pearlstein has
written:
