Re: On the Need to Take Both Roads to Open Access

From: Peter Suber <peters_at_EARLHAM.EDU>
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2003 20:18:50 -0400

Richard,

At 11:40 PM 10/8/2003 +0100, Richard Durbin wrote:

>I have been watching this mailing list for some time.
>
>Although I applaud open archiving, from my point of view open access
>publishing is what is needed in the long run.
>
>This is because the key property is not that everyone can get at a copy
>of a publication, but rather that people can use information in it
>computationally, producing extracts, syntheses, new indexes etc. This
>is now possible.
[...]

I agree with this point completely, and have said so in print. But you
seem to draw the conclusion that OA journals are more useful for this
purpose than OA archives. But either they are equally valuable for this
purpose (they are equally open for crawling by intelligent bots for
indexing and analysis) or archives are even more valuable (because journals
don't publish data sets).

If I didn't misread you, could you say more about why OA journals will
serve this purpose better than OA archives?

      Thanks,
      Peter




----------
Peter Suber
Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
Author, SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Editor, Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/
peter.suber_at_earlham.edu
Received on Thu Oct 09 2003 - 01:18:50 BST

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