the gipster: How the internet can make knowledge disappear and 2 ways to stop it

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-12-26

Summary:

"Knowledge is vulnerable. It’s hard to come by and far too often, it disappears. Every researcher on the planet surely has some result lying in a drawer, not being shared, largely unknown. Maybe it’s not up to their standards yet, or perhaps it’s a negative result. More likely, they tried to publish it, but the process became too arduous. The results are there. They are knowledge. And when they never get shared, they eventually disappear. The internet offers some help. It makes it easier to preserve knowledge. There are new ways to communicate and document research results. It has also become easier to store and share data ... These questions become important not least of all when a library discontinues a subscription. If a digital journal is a product, the purchased issues should still be available. If, on the other hand, the library has purchased access to a database for a particular amount of time, then they likely won’t have access to anything when they stop paying, not even to the articles they could read when they did pay.  In Norway, some of the purchasing from publishers is coordinated at the national level. Because I head the board of the coordinating organization, I know that various publishers view this issue differently. We’re far from having achieved a standard solution.  We might think that ongoing access to research articles could be preserved if libraries simply archived all the articles and journals that they subscribe to digitally, just like they archive earlier issues of paper journals.  Publishers generally don’t allow this, but even if they did, the quantity is unmanageable. The largest publishers no longer sell subscriptions to specific journals; instead, they make very large packages that the libraries must purchase, even if they only want a few of the journals in that package. A consequence of buying in bundles, however, is that libraries end up with access to tens of thousands of articles, many of which are of no interest to their researchers. So even if they could, they may not want to use resources archiving that material.  Combining the various legal restrictions — which have different details at different publishers — with the technical and practical challenges, the preservation of scientific articles and the knowledge they contain has become a precarious enterprise.  Responsibility for archiving has been subtly transferred from libraries to publishers. This makes knowledge vulnerable. What happens when a publisher goes bankrupt? What happens if their systems break down? What happens if human error leads to large scale deletion? What if they can’t keep up with technical advancements? What if they decide to raise their fees?  Open access is part — but only part — of the solution ... First of all, there’s open access. When publishers implement open access strategies — and when researchers make use of them — articles become freely available and they can be archived locally.  But this isn’t enough. Even with open access, there are practical challenges. University archives must decide on a strategy and find technical solutions. Will they build an archive only of work produced by their own employees, or will they build an archive of all open access articles they subscribe to? ... The green open access model is both more common and more complicated. In this approach, publishers allow authors to place in open archives a non-final version of their article. One problem with this approach is that two different versions of the article are then being used: the published version and the archived pre-publication version.  Another problem is variation in restrictions on archiving. Sometimes, the regulations that publishers impose become absurd. Consider, for example, what I like to call Elsevier’s anti-policy policy. Elsevier allows individual researchers to place a non-final version of their article in an institutional archive, e.g. at their home university.  They allow this, that is, unless the researcher’s home university has a policy requiring research results to be placed in an archive — which many do, to encourage increased public access to the results of publicly financed research. If you’re publishing in one of Elsevier’s journals, you can post a non-final version of your paper in an archive … unless you have to. In that case, you can’t ... The second way to counter a potential loss of knowledge with digital publishing comes from creative new approaches to large-scale archiving. Libraries, publishers, and an independent archiving organization form a coalition to create archives of the publishers’ journals. Two prominent organizations doing this work arePortico and LOCKSS. They have different strategies, but both work to reduce

Link:

http://thegipster.blogspot.com/2013/12/how-internet-can-make-knowledge.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.comment oa.mandates oa.green oa.universities oa.libraries oa.ir oa.preservation oa.librarians oa.infrastructure oa.funders oa.colleges oa.lockss oa.publishers oa.government oa.repositories oa.hei oa.policies oa.journals

Date tagged:

12/26/2013, 13:05

Date published:

12/26/2013, 08:05