Amy Harmon, New Premise in Science: Get the Word Out Quickly, Online nytimes.com
[ meanwhile, back on the copyright beat, along with the science and genomics and economics and who knows what else beat ... I've been posting a bunch of Science links here, I guess I should be posting articles, because the links are going to go dead soon. ]
Unfettered access to the literature, library supporters say, would eliminate unnecessary duplication and allow doctors in poor countries, scientists at budget-conscious institutions, high school students, cancer patients and anyone else who could not afford subscriptions to benefit from existing research and add to it.
Moreover, they say, the taxpayers, who spend nearly $40 billion a year on biomedical research, should not have to pay again — or wait some unspecified period — to be able to search for and see the results themselves. . . .
Still, in addition to making data available to more people sooner, the electronic library's founders argue that the research itself becomes more valuable when it is not walled off by copyrights and Balkanized in separate electronic databases. They envision the sprouting of a kind of cyber neural network, where all of scientific knowledge can be searched, sorted and grafted with a fluidity that will speed discovery.
Under the library's editorial policy, any data can be integrated into new work as long as the original author is credited appropriately. The model is inspired by GenBank, the central repository of DNA sequences whose open access policy has driven much of the progress in genomics and biotechnology of the last decade. |
