[sc-announce] Beyond open access -- Science Commons blog

Donna Wentworth dwentworth at creativecommons.org
Wed Feb 27 18:56:37 EST 2008


Beyond open access

February 27th, 2008<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/02/27/beyond-open-access/>by
dwentworth

In the introduction<http://poynder.blogspot.com/2008/02/open-access-interviews-john-wilbanks.html>to
his
interview <http://www.richardpoynder.co.uk/John_Wilbanks_Interview.pdf>[PDF]
with our own John Wilbanks, UK journalist Richard Poynder succinctly
captures the Science Commons perspective on open
access<http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm>— that making
research freely accessible online is only the beginning of
making it useful for scientists:

John Wilbanks <http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/wilbanks/>, VP
of Science
Commons <http://sciencecommons.org//>, has an even broader view of the role
the Internet has to play in science. Like Murray-Rust, Wilbanks believes it
is essential for research papers to be machine-readable. Likewise, he
believes we need to develop an appropriate legal infrastructure to
facilitate this. He also believes it is essential that science databases are
freely available, and that these databases are interoperable — not just with
one another, but with research literature.

In addition, Wilbanks believes the Internet should be viewed as a platform
for facilitating the free circulation and sharing of the physical tools of
science — cell lines <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_lines>,
antibodies<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibodies>,
plasmids <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmid> etc. In a sense, he wants to
see these tools embedded into research papers — so if a reader of an Open
Access paper wants more detailed information on, say, a cell line, they
should be able to click on a link and pull up information from a remote
database. […]

The end game, explains Wilbanks, is to make the research process as seamless
and frictionless as possible. This implies that the scholarly paper is no
longer simply an article to be viewed by as many eyeballs as possible, but
also the raw material for multiple machines and software agents to data
mine, a front-end to hundreds of databases, and the launch pad for an
ecommerce system designed to speed up the process of research.

In this light, Open Access is not an end in itself, but the necessary
precondition for a complete revolution in the way that science is done…

Precisely.

The interview is part of a
series<http://www.richardpoynder.co.uk/The%20OA%20Interviews.htm>stretching
back to 2001, which includes talks with the great Peter
Murry-Rust<http://poynder.blogspot.com/2008/01/open-access-interviews-peter-murray.html>,
Peter Suber<http://poynder.blogspot.com/2007/10/basement-interviews-peter-suber.html>,
BioMed Central founder Vitek
Tracz<http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/05/interview-with-vitek-tracz.html>and
many others leading the charge for open access. Highly recommended.
................
Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
dwentworth at creativecommons.org <kaitlin at creativecommons.org>
................
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