On 10 Mar 2008, at 09:11, Andy Powell wrote:
> Well, I hope that you are right... I certainly don't have the will or
> ability to fight a political and technical agenda that has become so
> entrenched worldwide and that says there is only one 'right' way of
> achieving OA.
Those who are involved in Open Access lobbying will be interested to
hear that they have gone from being an ignored, sidelined special
interest group, to being an entrenched worldwide movement. Even those
who shout loudest for institutional repositories are doing so not
because of some predisposition towards dogma, but because they seem
the favourite choice out of a number of practical alternatives.
Saying that we want to "build compelling scholarly social networks" or
"surface scholarly content on the Web" is just another way of
restating a shared goal of Open Access. Saying that "we might be
better to start by thinking in terms of the social networks that
currently exist in the research community" is to confirm what happened
five years ago when the difference between discipline-grounded and
institutionally-grounded repositories was being thrashed out. You
comment that "social networks ... are largely independent of the
institution", but that is only to take into account SOME facets of an
researcher's social network - in particular it is to ignore the
researcher's career development, promotion and contractual
relationships.
However, no-one who backs Open Access can afford to pish-tush any
sound, practical and tested ideas about improving takeup, so bring
them on! In fact, lay them down as part of the Developer Challenge in
the forthcoming Open Repositories conference, and see if we can't get
any of them prototyped for you. Web 2.0/social networks are taking up
two sessions, so clearly repositories are already experimenting with
these channels.
But in the meantime, we have to recognise that titivating a user
interface isn't go to turn anyone from a "heads down, don't have time
to do what you ask" researcher into a grateful repository convert or
even a Web 2.0 user!
--
Les Carr
|