MACROSCOPE
Open Access and the Progress of Science
The power to transform research communication may be at each scientist's fingertips
Alma Swan
We Cite What We See
How does science measure the worth of a published piece of work? The
standard metric today is the citation: Highly cited articles (and
journals) have measurable impact. As open-access publishing
experiments are moving forward, they are beginning to rack up
numbers. By definition an open-access article has greater
visibility, and it's becoming evident that scientists do take the
opportunity to read and use what they would otherwise not have seen.
The bar chart on the next page shows that across a range of
scholarly disciplines, opening access to articles increases their
citation rate. Behind the numbers are the new collaborations that
result when scientists who don't know of one another's work discover
synergies that can be exploited. Science needs open access to
facilitate that process.
Open access can advance science in another way, by accelerating the
speed at which science moves. In most fields, open access is still a
rarity rather than the norm, but in some fields of physics
(high-energy, condensed matter and astrophysics) it has been
commonplace for more than a decade. The arXiv, an open-access
archive now maintained at Cornell University, contains copies of
almost every article published in these disciplines, deposited by
the authors for all to use. Tim Brody of Southampton University has
measured the time between when articles are deposited in arXiv and
when citations to those articles begin to appear. Over the years,
this interval has been shrinking as the arXiv has come into
near-universal use as a repository and as physicists have taken
advantage of the fact that early posting of preprints allows them
immediate access to others' results. In other words, a system built
on open access is shortening the research cycle in these
disciplines, accelerating progress and increasing efficiency in physics.
Open access can also advance science by enabling semantic computer
technologies to work more effectively on the research record. Such
advanced software technologies already exist, awaiting a larger
corpus because they need the full text of scientific articles to
work on, not just the abstract. Semantic technologies can do two
things. First, they hold out the promise of being able to integrate
different types of research output—articles, databases and
other digital material—to form a single, integrated
information resource and to create new, meaningful and useful
information from it. An early example of this sort of knowledge
creation is the Neurocommons, a project of the ScienceCommons
organization. Second, Web 2.0 technologies, the set of tools that
aid collaborative effort (including social tagging and filtering and
weblogs), can help scientists in their work by offering
personalization mechanisms that enable them to tailor and enhance
what information they access and share, saving time and effort.
Open access also enables a different kind of software tool to aid
the management of science. Such tools search full-text articles and
index the references they contain—the citations to other
articles. They can thus calculate the impact of an individual
article (the number of times it is cited) and do the same for its
author, and for her research group, department or institution if
required. They can track the evolution of ideas, topics and fields
and facilitate trends analysis, enabling better prediction of which
research areas are waxing and waning. The value of such tools to
research managers, policymakers and funders will be enormous,
enabling better funding and planning decisions to be made in the
interest of scientific progress. To work, though, they need access
to the full-text of research articles—an open literature.
Finally, the new ways in which science is being done are themselves
requiring the culture and norms of open access. Interdisciplinary
science, a rapidly growing phenomenon, needs open access because
traditional methods do not provide effective ways by which
scientists can reach out to those in unconnected fields. An open
literature facilitates the finding and coming together of disparate
scientific efforts that in a closed-access world are circumscribed
by conventional definitions of topic, field or discipline and
isolated from one another in discrete families of journals. The rise
of e-science, where global collaborations generate data in vast
quantities, demands the means for open and immediate sharing of
information. And informal channels such as wikis and blogs that are
used for disseminating scientific information that cannot be
communicated by journals—including time-critical
information—must be accompanied by access to the peer-reviewed
literature if scientific information is to be accurately conveyed
and interpreted.
So yes, open access can advance science and will do so more and more
effectively as more scientists make their work freely available.
Moreover, science will not benefit in a vacuum: New work by
economist John Houghton and colleagues at the University of Victoria
in Melbourne shows that enhanced access to research findings is
likely to result in an enhanced return on investment in research and
development, something that can benefit every economy in the world.
Research is expensive enough that the world can scarcely afford an
antiquated, inefficient and high-cost system of information dissemination.
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