Berlin 5: Open access – both easy and difficult

I’ve arrived at Berlin 5 after the welcoming. The Opening Plenary is by Sijbold Noorda
(on behalf of European Universitie Association) with the theme: “Open access – both easy and difficult”. (PMR: No comments from me).
It’s a simple concept with complicated realities
OA is not new. It’e the analogue of public libraries in the C19: “do in the digital age what publishers and public libraris did in the old days; make accessible to the public what should be public knowledge”.
His themes:

• digital access
• business
• quality
• archives
• e-science
• variety

– Digital access:
Basic rule of all researchers: “make your work is digitally traceable, searchable, harvestable”. Otherwise you do not exist.
Everyone can self-archive [some form of their work].
“all you need is a well-connected and well-arranged repository”.
“why do only a few of us practice what we preach?”
– Business:
subscriptions replaced by advanced payments. Only one tiny possibility. Wouldn’t change publishers – advantage would be that community would be broader and Open. Cost carried by those who produce knowledge.
Broadcasting mode. It becomes interesting when the business model changes. E.g. SCOAP – the CERN publishing model. Selling rights to publishers. CERN will save ca. 40% on pubication costs.
Completely new power structure. Hybrid models are a complication and bring little useful, especially for libraries.
– clients. OA Does not solve pricing issues. The public at large is a client
– physicians in small hospitals, insurers cannot read the literature.
Sending the bills to researchers changes the model. They don’t see the bills for current model. But if they have to pay. Overcomes fragmentation by cooperating.
(NB: changing rules is hard for young researchers.)
– Quality matters. peer hierarchy and review is critical. Reliability matters.
Labelling must be done and if publishers don’t do it, some one else must. Cannot leave it to the blogosphere.
– Archiving. The faster the innovations the greater the problems. e.g. reconstruct old IBM and CDC from late 1970’s (PMR: I remember them…)
It can and should be handled by public library consortia.
– E-science. Data sharing, virtual labs, collaborattories, wikis, multi-media e-learning. Need projects and experiments. Forerunners like university presses consortium. Barend Mons has a closed virtual community – entry is when you have publisher 3 peer-reviewed papers anywhere – then you can enter and comment on anything.
What about the book? we will never be able to do without it.
European cooperation may make the difference, have a key role. Standards, connections, making academics more independent of publishers.
[Fred Friend: over 30% of UK-funded research is not available to most other UK universities.]