SHAPING THE NETWORK SOCIETY
Patterns for Participation, Action, and Change
http://www.cpsr.org/conferences/diac02
Tomorrow's information and communication infrastructure
is being shaped today. But by whom and to what ends?
Seattle: May 16-19
Questions: diac02-info_at_cpsr.org
Keynote Address on the Budapest Open Access Initiative
http://cpsr.org/conferences/diac02/program.html
Friday morning, May 17.
Open Research Access for an Open Society
Stevan Harnad
ABSTRACT: Not all information is or can be free: Texts that authors
write in order to sell them (books, magazine articles) are unlikely
to become give-aways, even in the digital network era. But there is
one form of information that is and always has been an author
give-away, even though in the Gutenberg era it too had had to be
sold, and that is peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific research
articles. These are written for only one purpose: so that they
should be used by other researchers (read, cited, applied). Their
authors have never sought or received royalties or fees in exchange
for them; it was only the inescapable expense of paper printing and
distribution that had forced the journals that published them to
recover their costs through subscription and license charges in the
paper era. That era is now over, but nothing has yet changed. The
Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is dedicated to hastening
and facilitating the optimal and inevitable outcome: the transition
from toll-based access to toll-free online access to this special
literature (20,000 peer-reviewed journals, 2 million articles
annually, most of them currently inaccessible to most researchers
because of the toll-barriers) through two strategies: (1) helping
to promote author/institution self-archiving of authors' own
peer-reviewed, published articles and (2) helping to promote the
conversion of established journals to open access and the
establishment of new open-access journals. The benefits of opening
access to the research literature will be felt not only by
researchers worldwide, but by society as a whole.
Received on Fri Apr 26 2002 - 21:51:16 BST