[GOAL] Bold predictions for 2012

[Arthur Sale]

Richard, you asked what we’d like to see in 2012.

 

I’d like to see more open access journals, and higher prestige attached to 
those
that already exist.  Who wouldn’t?  I’d also like to see more ID/OA 
mandated
institutional repositories. Again who wouldn’t?  But I don’t see either 
strategy
as taking Open Access to the tipping point where a scholarly revolution becomes
unstoppable. Why? Because both strategies are too cerebral, too argumentative,
too technological, and they require at present unnatural actions on the part of
researchers.

 

What I want to predict is a growing number of researchers doing completely
natural things that have always been in their repertoire of work, for example
like keeping a lifetime record of their publications and ephemera. It used to be
a collection of paper, but the social media tools like Mendeley now allow this
to be electronic, and like the silent transition from typewriters to the
admittedly superior word processing software, I predict we will see a silent
transition to online in-the-cloud corpus collections. Making this open access is
technologically trivial, and I have named this the Titanium Road to open access:
light-weight, strong, robust and recognises what people actually do.

 

If I can make another prediction, I think that 2012 might just be the year that
we begin to question the copyright position of articles. Despite legal transfer
of copyright (sometimes) most publishers pay only lip-service to their
‘ownership’ and carry out minimal due diligence in their ‘purchase’ in 
return
for services, and researchers respond with total indifference by dispensing
copies of the Version-of-Record as they see fit. Never a week goes by when I do
not see someone post to a list “Can anyone send me a copy of Xxx by Yyy in
journal Zzz?” and it appears they almost always are satisfied by their later
posts of effusive thanks. The law in respect of scholarly articles has to
change, and this might be the year that we begin to see cracks open up.

 

Finally, let me make my last prediction – that 2012 might see us begin to
address the issue of China, and the language barriers that look like being a
major part of the OA spectrum in this decade (2011-2020). The English-speaking
world and the European language speaking world have been happy to live with
English as the lingua franca (what a strange misnomer!), but the Asian-speaking
world is not likely to be so accommodating. We shall have to begin to treat open
access as a matter involving automatic translation, at first maybe just for
metadata, but later for the whole article.

 

Richard, you said you’d like to see short posts dominate this list, so I’ve 
been
brief to the point of encryption. I am happy to expand on any of the previous
four paragraphs, recognising that some of them are separable issues. I hope I
have been controversial enough to get some responses.

 

Arthur Sale

University of Tasmania, Australia

 




    [ Part 2: "Attached Text" ]

_______________________________________________
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal