Re: Correcting Stevan Harnad's Misrepresentation

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Bernie,

I had in mind things I have written about before, both in posts 
to this list and in an article (cited more than once on this 
list) entitled "Open Access 2.0" 
(http://journalofelectronicpublishing.org).  So my comments here 
add nothing new.

The "follow-through" question is being addressed by a number of 
people in different ways.  For example, there are investigations 
into essential infrastructure for developing countries to make 
even free or open access material useful.  (E.g., what good is 
open access if a population is illiterate?)  But broad social and 
political analyses are outside my area of expertise.  My own 
focus has been on aspects of media.

Simply making information available doesn't do very much--or what 
it will be required to do will become increasingly demanding in 
the coming years. Content has to be accessible in some way (a 
library subscription is one way, OA another:  the issues apply to 
both OA and toll-access publications), but it also has to be 
discoverable.  Thus, publishers of all stripes have to be 
sensitive to varyious indexing tools, of which search engines are 
of growing prominence.  This leads to the need for search-engine 
optimization, which is not uniformly or energetically practiced 
by publishers.

Content must also be designed to be embedded in an ongoing 
discussion.  In the technical world, this is the arena of Web 2.0 
applications.  Here again look at academic publications and ask 
whether their software platforms enable even a fraction of what 
any young person takes for granted on a consumer service like 
FaceBook.  No doubt conversations take place even in the absence 
of an enabling platform, but why would we not want all commentary 
to be available in the precincts of the original article?  The 
notion that this technology is cheap or easy is mind-boggling to 
anyone who spends time with professional software developers. 
(Or, as a talented engineer I know put it, it may be cheap, but 
it isn't easy.)

Content must also be mapped against all other content.  This is 
harder to do (Google's otherwise outstanding technology doesn't 
do this), but it is now coming within range.  Personally, I would 
like to be able to sign up for an automated service that queries 
a huge database of content on the economics of media by inputting 
every abstract of new material, delivering a visual 
representation of how each new article compares to preexisting 
material--right to my desktop or mobile phone.  (Google has a 32 
word limitation for queries.  Abstracts are longer than that.) 
The key is that the service would he automated; I wouldn't have 
to take the time to find the abstracts and paste in the queries.

Content must also be preserved in a way that makes it perpetually 
discoverable.  There are many specialists in library preservation 
on this list and I will thus limit my comment to remarking that 
few people I have spoken to believe that we have taken all the 
proper steps to ensure long-term access.

This list can go on and on.  In my view, there are two broad 
strategies.  We could put our resources into addressing some of 
these very challenging questions of follow-through for the huge 
amounts of academic content currently available under the 
toll-access regime, or we could expend resources on the marginal 
expansion of access prior to investing in the follow-through. 
Establishing these priorities is important, but the discussion to 
date has seemed limited and, to be frank, not at the level one 
would expect from any other area of academic investigation. 
(Yes, another pointer to myself:  "Putting Science into Science 
Publishing" at 
http://pubfrontier.com/2007/12/11/putting-science-into-science-publishing.) 
The NIH, the Wellcome Trust, the Harvard faculty, and many other 
organizations--and, of course, Stevan Harnad--have already 
reached their conclusions.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2@yahoo.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>; <espositoj@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 3:45 PM
Subject: Re: Correcting Stevan Harnad's Misrepresentation

> Joe Esposito says:
>
> "What is really needed in the research community is not open access but
> 'open access follow-through.'"
>
> I'm not quite sure what "open access follow-through" entails. Maybe Joe
> could explain?
>
> Bernie Sloan
> Sora Associates
> Bloomington, IN