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Re: [ox-en] Report from "Berlin 4 Open Access - From Promise to Practice"



Hi list!

3 weeks (27 days) ago Stefan Merten wrote:
I'm just going home from the Berlin 4 Open Access conference. It was
really a *very* interesting conference and I'm glad that I was there.

I created an extensive report from the conference. On this list I'll
post my impressions from the conference. If you like check

	http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/Research/ReportBerlin4

for additional reports on all the talks there and also a couple of
links.

After a comment from one of the speakers of that conference I
corrected a paragraph there. Indeed most institutional archives
conform to the OAI rules for meta data and thus can be searched by
centralized search engines looking like one big repository. This was
something I really missed.

Also I got references to - IMHO - one of the most interesting talks
given there. Ulrich Pöschl talked about the higher quality of
scientific discourse possible by OpenAccess methods. See his
presentation at

	http://dev.livingreviews.org/workshop2006/Poeschl_Berlin4OpenAccess_Potsdam2006.pdf

One snippet from page 4:

  We expect that the transition to open access will enhance the
  quality assurance and evaluation of scholarly output. This will be a
  direct consequence of the free availability of information.

In other words: According to this only the Free form Open Access is
able to provide better results. Exactly what we see in Free Software
and what makes Free Software successful.

Page 5 IMHO describes nicely consequences of the alienation processes
in classical science. In this case: Publications are done for other
reasons than to publish some interesting scientific results. Since
these things are more related to the way scientists compete with each
other for scarce resources - like funding money - I don't think these
effects can be fully overcome by Open Access - though they can
probably be limited and may be Open Access returns some of the
(unalienated) scientific spirit.

Page 6 describes some of the "Cathederal vs. Bazaar" point (yes,
cathederal and bazaar are wrong comparisons - but the term probably
describes most quickly what I mean). In essence: An process which does
not seek to erect artificial borders is more useful for a Free
endeavor than closed circles.

The picture on page 9 describes a process which IMHO is quite similar
to Free Software projects. In Free Software projects the referees are
probably the members of the core team while the scientific community
is the general public. The role of the editor could be seen as similar
to the role of a maintainer. The final revised paper is then a new
release of the product. However, in Free Software the release often is
only the starting point for the next release which is not the case for
scientific papers. But then software is different from papers.

For quick readers there are the key points summarized in

	http://dev.livingreviews.org/workshop2006/Poeschl_NAS-EJournalSummit2006_KeyPoints.pdf

For readers with more time and interest there is a longer paper at

	http://dev.livingreviews.org/workshop2006/Poeschl_LearnedPublishing_2004.pdf

There is also a nice paragraph describing the effects of alienation:

  Many papers reflect a mentality of publishing just as much and as
  fast as possible, rather than participation in vital scientific
  exchange and discussion. The inflationary increase of scientific
  publications is fuelled by the habit of evaluating scientific
  productivity by the number of papers. In many research areas
  scientists have to spend an excessive amount of time to maintain an
  overview of the information dispersed and diluted in the increasing
  flood of publications. These nuisances and aberrations lead to an
  enormous waste and misallocation of resources: researchers invest
  lots of time and effort in the reconstruction of poorly described
  methods and results; useless activities and erroneous conclusions
  are repeated and propagated; and scientists and projects are
  misevaluated.


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

--
Please note this message is written on an offline laptop
and send out in the evening of the day it is written. It
does not take any information into account which may have
reached my mailbox since yesterday evening.

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