Open Access implies more than the removal of toll barriers
and other physical restrictions (such as being open to a particular
community only). It also requires intellectual access in the
sense in which Stevan as well as most librarians use the term:
You need to be able to locate a known article.
I've heard people call this aspect "findability."
The available le search engines are of some but limited use, and
part of this limit is the failure of repositories to post harvestable metadata according to the now standard definition. We also need better search engines, but this is the sort of project many people like to work on, and they will come.
A related aspect can e called "linkability." One has to be able
to link to the OA material, both from other OA material, and
standard indexes, and even toll access versions of articles.
The likes from TA materials will be the most difficulty,
because we can not control or specify what TA providers do.
If I can be forgiven for speaking of PMC in a positive tone, one of its strengths was the association of the OA and the TA versions of articles.
For sometime, some OA advocates may have paid insufficient
attention to these librarian-type concerns, and I am glad they
now are doing so. In the present state, students have major problems with findability in the most basic sense. With experience, one
learns what is likely to be available, but OA should be removing
barriers, not creating them.
Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman_at_liu.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Rick Anderson
Sent: Fri 12/16/2005 6:05 PM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_listserver.sigmaxi.org
Subject: Re: Scientometric OAI Search Engines
. ..
> (4) Self-archiving mandates require self-archiving in an OAI-compliant
> Institutional (or Central) Repository (Archive) -- not just on an
> arbitrary website. All OAI-compliant archives will be harvested by
> OAIster (and probably also google scholar).
>
> (5) For 100% OA self-archiving, read "100% OA self-archiving in OAI
> IRs or CRs." (OAI-compliance was already part of the 2001 BOAI
> definition of OA!)
But I think this brings us back to my original point, Stevan, which is
that you are not the Official Definer of OA. Even the Budapest language
is only one of several competing definitions. Yes, if the whole world
defined OA exactly the same way you do, and if everyone complied with
its requirements, then OA would mean "universally and easily
accessible." ...
----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 784-6500 x273
rickand_at_unr.edu
Received on Mon Dec 26 2005 - 23:12:00 GMT