La comunicazione scientifica nel ventunesimo secolo: Google e oltre

Lo scenario della comunicazione scientifica è cambiato e non ci sono più confini tra produzione e mediazione dell'informazione. L'eccesso di informazione rende difficile il recupero mirato di materiali interessanti just in time. Google è uno strumento dalle potenzialità enormi ma non esaustivo.

As a PhD student in Southampton in the 90s, struggling to get the results I needed for my thesis, I ran into a couple of problems that surprised me. Firstly, it was often difficult to get hold of an article cited by something I was reading. Secondly, I was starved of data to try out my algorithms and techniques on. Where was all the data that the authors of these articles I was reading used? Why, in both cases, could I not just click and get the article or the data I needed? And this in Computer Science, the very discipline supposedly fixing such problems! When I looked at other fields, for the most part the situation was just as bad or worse. It seemed that science was missing out on a great opportunity. From then on I dedicated my career to addressing this situation. Firstly, still at Southampton, I built the EPrints.org software for open access to scholarly articles; then, at HP Labs, I led the development of the DSpace software system, to enable access to and preservation of scholarly articles and also the underlying scientific data. Now, with Google, who have already contributed enormously with such tools as Google Scholar, I hope to help further the goal of moving scholarly communication into the 21st century. I'll talk about how scholarly communication has progressed over the last decade, and how various technologies have helped improve the situation; I'll also talk about some of the challenges that still remain, and where we can all go from here. Robert Tansley is an engineer at Google, Inc., working on ways to improve access to scholarly digital articles and data, with such technologies as Google Scholar. Previously he worked as a senior research scientist at HP Labs, where he was the architect and lead developer of DSpace, an open source system for storing, accessing and preserving research and education articles and data. He was part of the team that designed OAI-PMH. Previously he completed a PhD in multimedia information systems at the University Of Southampton, UK in 2000, where he also designed and implemented the Eprints.org repository software.

The goal of Open Access (OA) is to grant anyone, anywhere and anytime free access to the results of scientific research. The High-Energy Physics (HEP) community has pioneered OA with its “pre-print culture”: the mass mailing, first, and the online posting, later, of preliminary versions of its articles. After almost half a century of widespread dissemination of pre-prints, the time is ripe for the HEP community to explore OA publishing. Among other possible models, a sponsoring consortium appears as the most viable option for a transition of HEP peer-reviewed literature to OA. A Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) is proposed as a central body which would remunerate publishers for the peer-review service, effectively replacing the “reader-pays” model of traditional subscriptions with an “author-side” funding. Funding to SCOAP3 would come from HEP funding agencies and library consortia through a re-direction of subscriptions. This model is discussed in details together with a quantitative description of the HEP publishing landscape leading to a practical proposal for a seamless transition of HEP peer-reviewed literature to OA publishing.

When you have put months or years of effort into producing your research findings, have carefully written them up as an article, and submitted it for peer review, what would you prefer - that your article is visible to peers in a limited number of universities around the world, or that it is visbile to all your peers, wherever they might be? Open Access ensures that your work can be seen by anyone who might be interested in reading and using it, raising the possible number of citations and increasing your impact. Alma describes the ways to achieve this exposure for your work, and what it can do for you. Alma and Les then conduct a debate, highlighting the common misunderstandings, worries, and fears about Open Access. The aim is to help listeners to see how the process works and how it does not conflict with any of their usual communication and publishing processes.