Momentum for Open Access

Inside Higher Ed:

Last year, a proposal in Congress to require all federally supported research to be placed online, freely available, attracted considerable attention and debate — and ultimately stalled.

This year, a measure that is narrower — it would apply only to research supported by the National Institutes of Health — appears within reach of passage. ...

While supporters of the “open access” movement continue to want a similar provision to apply to all federally supported research, they view the prospect of a win on NIH-supported research as a significant breakthrough. ...Passing the NIH bill would show that this is “sound and prudent public policy” and that “the sky won’t fall.”

But Patricia S. Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, said that her group’s opposition to the legislation was not lessened at all by its being limited this year to the NIH. Large publishers will be fine, but she predicted that the bill could eventually kill some small, nonprofit publishers that play key roles in advancing research. “It’s the law of unintended consequences and to us that’s very sad,” Schroeder said.

The open access movement comes from a combination of philosophical and economic views. Proponents argue that since the federal government pays for much of the research that ends up in journals, and colleges and universities support that research by hiring faculty members and creating laboratories, it is unfair for the results of that research to be available only to those who can afford high subscription fees for journals.

The movement has taken off in recent years at a time when libraries have felt intense budget pressure as the Web seemingly made it possible to share information at minimal cost. ...

On the Internet and the Embrace of Miscellanea

The Chronicle:

David Weinberger is perhaps best known as a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a document, written in 1999, that urges businesses to treat the Web as a “global conversation.” Now Mr. Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, says it’s time to shed “the idea that there’s a best way of organizing the world.”

In Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, a new book published last month, Mr. Weinberger argues that the Internet breaks down information so that people can reorganize it as they see fit. “Lots of people have seen lots of ways in which things are related, and we can express that on the Web,” says the author in an interview with the blog 10 Zen Monkeys. “We don’t have to minimize it.”

When a librarian files a book, he or she is forced to choose just one shelf through which to categorize the volume. “That’s not a natural restriction,” says Mr. Weinberger. The beauty of the Internet, he argues, is that physical space no longer dictates how detailed categorization and organization can become. —Brock Read

I agree with the concept (as any reader of this blog and its highly idosyncratic index would recognize immediately), but my librarian spouse would cause me harm if I didn't include the following comment, quickly posted to The Chronicle site:

The point about filing a book in only one spot is correct, but it is only part of the story. For years libraries have assigned multiple subject headings, author names, and secondary titles to catalog records. These additional access points enable a catalog user to find a book or other library resource in many different ways. The Internet clearly opens up access to library materials, but the basic concepts have been there all along.