Open access: why it matters
From PLN
Open access: why it matters
Some notes on the importance of open access (OA) itself, quite apart from possible secondary effects. Most of these notes are brief excerpts of longer essays by Peter Suber in SPARC Open Access Newsletter.
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A brief list of moral and pragmatic arguments for open access
- Reformatted from the postscript to Peter Suber's "Open access and the self-correction of knowledge."
Moral arguments
- OA frees authors and readers from needless access barriers
- OA returns the control of scholarship to scholars
- By increasing the author's impact, it advances the author's purpose in writing journal articles for impact rather than money
- OA counteracts the deliberate creation of artificial scarcity
- OA counteracts the deliberate and accidental maldistribution of knowledge
- OA de-encloses a commons
- OA serves the under-served
- For the special subset of publicly-funded research, open access is part of fundamental fairness to taxpayers.
Pragmatic arguments
- OA accelerates research and increases the productivity of researchers
- OA makes research more useful and increases the research funder's return on investment
- OA helps authors find readers and readers find authors
- OA reaches a wider audience at lower cost than toll-access forms of distribution
- OA saves money at both the author and reader sides of the distribution process
- OA widens dialogue, builds community, and supports cooperation
- OA enhances preservation by freeing downstream users to make copies and migrate content to new media and formats
- OA makes research literature and data available for crunching by new generations of sophisticated software (indexing, mining, summarizing, translating, linking, recommending, alerting, mash-ups, and other forms of processing).
The last-mile problem for knowledge
- Brief excerpts from Peter Suber's essay, "Open access and the last-mile problem for knowledge," in SPARC Open Access Newsletter #123, July 2, 2008.
In telecommunications the "last-mile problem" is the problem of connecting individual homes and businesses to the fat pipes connecting cities. Because individual homes and businesses are in different locations, hooking up each one individually is expensive and difficult...
We're facing a last-mile problem for knowledge. We're pretty good at doing research, writing it up, vetting it, publishing it, and getting it to locations (physical libraries and web sites) close to users. We could be better at all those things, but any problems we encounter along the way are early- or mid-course problems. The last-mile problem is the one at the end of the process: making individualized connections to all the individual users who need to read that research.
The last-mile problem for knowledge is not new. Indeed, for all of human history until recently it has been inseparable from knowledge itself and all our technologies for sharing it. It's only of interest today because the internet and OA give us unprecedented means for solving it, or at least for closing the gap significantly...
It helps to distinguish two reader-side stages of the last-mile problem for knowledge. Stage One is getting access to texts or data, and Stage Two is getting answers to questions. Stage One is getting access to texts or data, and Stage Two is getting answers to questions. The first treats scholarly communication as a delivery system. When there's a problem, it's the failure to complete the delivery. The second treats scholarly communication as a knowledge system. When there's a problem, it's the failure to convey understanding.
Stage one: Access to texts or data
You solve the last-mile problem for a published journal article when you put your hands on a hardcopy or display a digital copy on a screen in front of your face. This requires open access (OA) or money to pay for toll access (TA).
Acknowledging that money solves the problem, at least for some researchers, is just as important as acknowledging its limitations as a solution. It works for lucky individuals who have the money or who work at institutions that have the money. The snag, of course, is that all of us are unlucky for some priced literature, and most of us are unlucky for most of it.
The fact that the money solution doesn't work for everyone is the chief reason why the last-mile problem is a problem...
OA is the only solution that scales to the full size of the problem and keeps pace with the growth of published knowledge. No matter how fast the OA literature grows, you'll only need an internet connection to have access to all of it...
Stage two: Getting answers to questions
Suppose you have a question. You're lucky if some careful, curious researchers have already asked the same question and done some of the needed research. You're luckier if some of them have taken the research far enough to answer the question, write up their answers, win the approval of peer reviewers, and publish them. You're even luckier if there's a scientific consensus on the right answer to your question and that among the published papers on it, at least one is up to date, written in your language, and written at your level of understanding. You're even luckier if the Stage One problem has been solved and, thanks to OA or money, you have access to at least one of the enlightening papers which meets all your conditions.
It may look like this scenario goes about as far as it can to close the gap between you and existing knowledge. But it leaves some nagging parts of what I'm calling Stage Two of the last-mile problem. How do you go beyond access to answers? We grant that you're darned lucky, and that if you could find one of the enlightening papers, then you could retrieve it, and if you could read it, then you could understand it. But not all published papers meet your conditions for an enlightening paper. In fact, nearly all of them don't. How do you know that an enlightening paper even exists? When you go looking, how can you find one that meets your conditions, and distinguish it from other papers which happen to use the same keywords or even address the same question?
Without solutions to these problems, you might as well be trapped in a maze knee-deep in conflicting maps thrown over the wall by people trying their utmost to be helpful.
For people with less luck, Stage Two problems are more numerous and more difficult. How do you do find a good answer when there's no consensus?...
To solve these problems, access to the papers is necessary but not sufficient. But while OA is only part of the solution to the Stage Two problem, it's a precondition to most other parts of the solution. No tools yet suffice to solve the Stage Two problem, and maybe no tools ever will. But the tools that help us inch toward a solution presuppose OA literature and data the way telescopes presuppose open access to the sky. In fact, one of the primary benefits of OA is to provide the inputs to a new generation of sophisticated tools to facilitate research, discovery, and analysis. Whatever methods we use to attack Stage Two problems, OA will streamline our solutions and lack of OA will limit their scope and slow us down...
Most Stage Two problems can only be solved with human judgment. But that doesn't rule out the possibility of technologies to lend us a hand. The reason is simply that we are building technologies that harness human judgments, at least when those judgments are digital, online, and accessible to the tools...
The potential
As long as the last-mile problem remains unsolved, rapidly growing human knowledge will coexist with rapidly growing unmet demand for that knowledge. As long as the problem remains unsolved, the uses we make of recorded knowledge will fall far short of its usefulness.
It's staggering to think about what could happen if the knowledge we have painstakingly discovered, articulated, tested, refined, validated, gathered, and delivered to the tarmac were systematically distributed to all who need it. Imagine if what was known became more widely known, especially among those who could put it to use. Imagine if we become even 10% more effective at using what we know.
Self-correction of knowledge
- Very brief excerpts from Peter Suber's essay, "Open access and the self-correction of knowledge," in SPARC Open Access Newsletter 122, June 2, 2008
Here's an epistemological argument for OA. It's not particularly new or novel. In fact, I trace it back to some arguments by John Stuart Mill in 1859. Nor is it very subtle or complicated. But it's important in its own right and it's importantly different from the moral and pragmatic arguments for OA we see more often.
The thesis in a nutshell is that OA facilitates the testing and validation of knowledge claims. OA enhances the process by which science is self-correcting. OA improves the reliability of inquiry...
[W]e must issue "a standing invitation to the whole world" to find fault with our knowledge claims. This requires disseminating our claims as widely as possible. We don't have to compel everyone to read our work and comment on it... But we do have to make our claims available to everyone who might care to read and comment on them.
That's OA in a nutshell, or OA from the perspective of authors and publishers. We can see the same point from the perspective of readers. Before we can identify the weaknesses in a theory, or hope to correct them, we must know what the theory says. Before we can decide whether an alleged error is an actual error, or whether a proposed correction is justified, we must know what the proponents and opponents of the theory have to say about it...
Related articles
- Open access basics -- a great starting point to think about open access.
- Open access overview -- a more complete introduction by Peter Suber
- Open access issues -- a few of the issues that remain.
- Open access resources -- selective blogs, wikis and other sites supporting and discussing aspects of open access.
- Open access myths -- quick notes on some of the myths that continue to be raised.
- Open access controversies -- nothing is ever simple, and OA is no exception.
- Thinking about libraries and access -- Some reasons you should care about OA. A commentary on libraries and open access from an "open access independent."
Your turn: Talk about it
As always, you're welcome to add material directly here or on the talk page (subject to editing), or to email it--noting which PLN article you think it should go in--to me (waltcrawford@gmail.com or crawford@palinet.org), if you'd rather not do the wiki markup and you'd like an early editing pass.
