open access

SCIENCE 2.0 -- IS OPEN ACCESS SCIENCE THE FUTURE?

Is the True Story of the Internet the idealistic open access "Information Wants to be Free" version of the W3C, Tim Berners-Lee, and the most creative digital youth today? Or is the True Story of the Internet the overnight success of twenty-two year old billionaires who turn all that user-generated content, all the information data-mined from social networking sites, and all those social graphs of interconnections (the social interconnections of Facebook friends graphed the world over) into a vc'd globally-extended business with new targeted forms of advertising, coercion, and (always) ever new and fancier toys--higher speed, better definition, more customizable, better looking, Kanye West/Daft Punk's harder, better, faster, stronger?

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert and an ace blogger, talks about the complication of giving away stuff for free on the internet. Like blogging. Giving Stuff Away Free on the internet is more complicated than you think. This is one of several different contributions to the complicated topic of "open access" or "free access" on the HASTAC blog.

Harvard's recent Open Access publishing mandate makes me think about what it would look like to make a national, interoperable open archive, across all of the libraries, across all the electronic archives, and that took into consideration production as well as consumption in its general business plan. Can't we all get along? (Aphorism for the day: We are all interconnected. You cannot starve one person in the food chain and expect to have a banquet at the end.)

The Gutenberg-e history monographs, begun in 1999 in collaboration with the American Historical Association, is going open source. It's a great resource--but none of the predictions about how easy and cheap it would be and all the problems of scholarly publishing it would solve have come true. It's important to think (yet again!) about why. Plus a free link (for one month) to the CHE piece.