Open Access and Practical Access

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

Some of the recent discussions on this list, and some of the general
excitement about Google Scholar and similar attempts at organizing the
multiple versions of articles lead logically to the question of whether
the increased number of OA journal articles will cause more or less
confusion to the library user looking for an article (which is what I mean
by Practical Access).

I think that the amount of confusion will greatly increase in the next few
years until one of the following:

a) all material becomes OA. The development of OACI and similar devices
can serve adequately for finding material.

or

b) some group devises a super-sfx to link users to the best available
version. A necessary part of this will be something like Google Scholar,
or an OACI expanded to cover non OA articles also; the super-sfx would
then link to the best version practically available (if there were a
single such version).

There's already a major problem in teaching library use, because most
college students go to the aggregated article databases only, with their
temporarily available and often plain text only versions, which is what
they learned in high school and the only version they know about. If the
use of OACIs become prevalent, they will go to an OACI that will bring
them to the OA version of articles, inferior though an author's version is
likely to be.  Even if the real articles are linked from the OA versions,
as they are supposed to be, and even if the institution has them
available, they won't know enough to use them in preference.

or

c) the professional scholars devise their own private systems, and the
existing systems will continue as a system for the general public and
those not in the elite universities, just as a few hundred years ago there
were those who could communicate in Latin and those who could not.

The general public, having proven unwilling to pay for a high quality
educational and library system for all, will be ignored, just as it was
for centuries. In those centuries there was non-economic based support for
the then-existing academic systems; I do not thing the same reasons still
apply.

or

d) the professional scholars devise their own systems, just as they
devised arXiv, (and just as they devised the still existing standard
scientific journal and abstract system over the previous generations, and
the existing systems will rapidly be abandoned to the antiquarians.

a)?

The apparently simplest solution is a) 100% OA, because we know several
good methods of bringing it about.  However, the methods all require
cooperation involving essentially all users, authors, libraries, funding
agencies, and publishers. The developments of the past year have made
clear to even the most optimistic that such cooperation is altogether
unlikely, and that the most that can be expected is small scale
experiments, heavily subsidized.

b)?

Some publishers are thought to favor b), a complex linking system, because
they expect to make money selling --not journals--but the extremely
complicated combined systems that will be needed.

c)?

This would continue the already existing class division in the educational
and research world, and by removing even the elements of a common medium
of communication, would perpetuate them.

d)?

A new system initiated by the users themselves is left as the best we can
realistically hope for. It might be very good, and not a mere default, if
people of the highest quality devote their efforts to it. Librarians now
need to convince the scholars in the disciplines that they have something
to contribute, and so do publishers. My experience with professional
academics leads me to think that very few will be convinced of the
essential need for either profession.

The author would be very interested in hearing privately of basically
different alternatives. There are trivial variations enough.

Dr. David Goodman
dgoodman@liu.edu