Earlier this week I had the pleasure to attend a talk by Jean-Claude Guédon from the University of Montreal: Let the real OA stand up! say researchers, librarians, publishers, citizens, …
Guédon, renowned OA activist and promoter, has interesting viewpoints - certainly more innovative than I would have thought. He gave a general historical introduction to OA and then continued with a more in-depth analysis of the current issues the movement is facing in order to build an “open access world”. A couple of points I liked:
Science Citation Index. The existence of a commercial index for citations in academic documents is a dubious one. Indexes like SCI, initially created for the sole function of aiding information retrieval have been used for decades for quality assessment and research evaluation. The elitist circles around “prestigious” journals and their extremely high subscription fees are the result of such an antiquate evaluation mechanism. With the electronic tools we have, we can do much better than that - and we will.
Copyrights and authors. Authors want to know nothing about copyrights. A number of emerging journals offer solutions in between OA and semi-OA with funky and obscure copyright policies. Projects like Sherpa/Romeo offer useful search engines to browse through all rights offered by different journals, but do we really need all that? Creative and Science Commons are doing a great job at making copyright simple.
Institutional vs. Subject. Institutional and subject repositories are compatible. True. There has been too much discussion on the subject. Subject or institutional? Just let the repository begin. Interoperability and semantic content will sort content out accordingly to the reader needs.
The talk was held on Monday May 8th in Geneva at ITU as a part of a series of Library Science Talks.
