Archetype

Open access is good for us

A paper published in today’s Science Magazine¹ shows that citation of scientific papers increases as journals switch to allow free and unrestrictive access of their content online. This seemingly intuitive result becomes interesting when paired with the observation that open access has a great positive impact in developing world participation in global science.

The authors highlight that the effects of open access are stronger for publications within the natural science. The explanation is that in our field, compared to physics or social sciences, it is rare that one can get preprints through freely accessible databases maintained for that specific purpose. From my own experience with the publishing dynamics in biology,  I was very surprised to see how many preprints in topics related to philosophy of biology one can get from PhilPapers, an online database for philosophy that just went public on January 28, 2009! Let me stress the word preprint here. In the narrow field of ant taxonomy it almost never happens that authors submit their papers to antbase.org for example, a database created for that purpose, even after they have been published.

But the main point of this paper is that the influence of open access was also stronger in the developing world, where individual scientists may struggle to get access to relevant publications through their funding strap host institutions. This result puts more sound into the argument that Donat Agosti, creator of antbase.org, has been putting forward- biodiversity is greatest in the developing Southern Hemisphere and we will all benefit the most from facilitating local conservation related science by making the necessary data available without restrictions. Keeping access to taxonomic descriptions restricted is akin to imposing a copyright on species².

Now, you won’t be able to read the full article unless you have a subscription to Science which is, I think, a delicious irony.

References

Tags: antbase.org, Donat Agosti, Open access

2 Comments to Open access is good for us

1

Kurt Pickett
February 25, 2009

I wonder if Science will take a hint from itself, make itself free, and thus expand its already monstrous hegemony. Oh wait, that’d mean too much lost money. Never mind.

2

Roberto Keller
February 25, 2009

Kurt- you just blew all your chances to ever get a paper published in Science Magazine with the above comment (yes, this blog is read religiously by all their board of trustees). I suggest you start courting the journal Nature instead.