Re: Repositories: Institutional or Central ? emergent properties and the compulsory open society

From: Alma Swan <a.swan_at_TALK21.COM>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 06:17:06 +0000

On 11/02/2009 21:37, "Klaus Graf" <klausgraf_at_GOOGLEMAIL.COM> wrote:

> The short email conversation says nothing on CREAM OF SCIENCE. Don't
> confuse DARE and Cream of Science which is a subset of DARE.
>
> "Cream of Science showcases prominent research from the Netherlands.
> The website lists the names of 217 top Dutch academics, providing
> worldwide access to their 48,559 publications. About 60% of these can
> be accessed full text. These full-text publications are a subset of
> NARCIS and DAREnet."
>
> 60 % is a very high rate. It was a project which has shown that the
> leading scholars of a small European countries support OA. That's the
> fact. If DARE is unable to learn from the CoS experience then this
> isn't an argument against CoS.

The discussion at the time, regarding the content of both DAREnet and that
of Cream of Science, was not about the proportion that is full-text, but
about the fact that it is mostly legacy material. Indeed, CoS set out to
capture the life's work of those 200 top Dutch scientists, and did it
magnificently well. Leo acknowledged then that it was not possible to
produce a figure for the proportion of NEW publications that appear in
either CoS or the DAREnet collection, whether full-text or not, and we still
don't have that figure today.

Whilst older material is nice to have, the focus for Open Access is to make
CURRENT research results freely available. The aim of Open Access, which
seems to have escaped in the excitement of this debate, is to help science
progress optimally by ensuring the unimpeded movement of scientific
information around research community. CoS is a great collection, but even
if 100% of the CoS documents are full-text, if most those texts are 5-, 10-,
20-, 30-years old they are probably not going to make much of a difference
to scientific progress this week.

In this digital age, scientists should be able to see their peers' results
as soon as they are ready for publication, in order to build upon them at
once. Artificial delay built into the system is an anachronism.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK
Received on Thu Feb 12 2009 - 12:41:25 GMT