Open Reading Frame: Response to Science Study of Citations - The Diigo Meta page

• 02 Jul 09
  

  Michel Roland

  e-journals evans serendipity

  • What this suggests to me is that the driving force in Evans' suggested "narrow[ing of] the range of findings and ideas built upon" is not online access per se but in fact commercial access, with its attendant question of who can afford to read what.  Evans' own data indicate that if the online access in question is free of charge, the apparent narrowing effect is significantly reduced or even reversed.  Moreover, the commercially available corpus is and has always been much larger than the freely available body of knowledge (for instance, DOAJ currently lists around 3500 journals, approximately 10-15% of the total number of scholarly journals).  This indicates that if all of the online access that went into Evans' model had been free all along, the anti-narrowing effect of Open Access would be considerably amplified.
  • A great deal of work was done in the 1970s, which is now completely ignored. Researchers rediscover wheels again and again, when a search of the earlier literature would have revealed that what they think of as novel, was novel 50 years ago!
• 22 Aug 08
  

  Lisa Spiro

  research openaccess

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