Friday, August 18, 2000

LOGGING IN WITH . . . William Arms 'Open Access' is the Wave of the Information Future, Scholar Says By FLORENCE OLSEN The trend toward free access to research and scholarship online is gaining momentum, surprising even experts such as William Y. Arms, a professor of computer science at Cornell University and editor in chief of D-Lib Magazine, a journal of digital-library research. A frequent lecturer on the topic, Mr. Arms teaches an advanced course on research in digital libraries and electronic publishing. His article, "Automated Digital Libraries: How Effectively Can Computers Be Used for the Skilled Tasks of Professional Librarianship?" appears in the July/August 2000 issue of D-lib. Mr. Arms earned a degree in mathematics from the University of Oxford's Balliol College and a Ph.D. in operational research from the University of Sussex. Q. Do you favor an open-access model for online publishing? A. The open-access model has been widely accepted. I'm delighted to see it. Clearly, there is an enormous amount of information that the people who create it want to see widely distributed, and that's turning out to be more than any of us expected. Q. What is the financing model for open access that seems to be working? A. On the network, the vast majority of open-access information is put up by the creators or suppliers of that information. You see a great deal of information being put up because organizations or individuals want to tell the world about what they do. Universities put up an enormous amount of information -- some of it things like research and curricula. The general model tends to be people putting up information that they create with their own budgets because they're competing for people to read it. When I do research as a university faculty member, I publish it [on the Internet] because I want people to read it. We have tremendous incentives to get our work distributed as widely as possible, and we're prepared to put a bit of our time, use a bit of our department money, to make it happen. Q. Are the costs of making this information available relatively insignificant, given the technology that is being used to publish it? A. A lot of organizations spend between 1 and 5 percent of their budgets to tell the world what they do, and the Internet is a wonderful way to do that. If you think of the cost of printing reports and papers and distributing them, it is so much cheaper just to put information up on the Internet for people to gather. The Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School grew out of the wishes of the staff of the Supreme Court to get their information out. It started with the law school providing a Web site for the Supreme Court, and it's grown from that into a major source of openly accessible information, financed by the New York Bar Association and others. Q. Do you think people are getting more information than they did when they relied entirely on information that was published on paper? A. In 1990, what percentage of the information that you used in your professional work was available openly, without payment? For most people, the answer is a very small percentage -- maybe 1 percent, or even less. I ask people, what percentage of information that you use nowadays in your professional life is available with open access? And depending on the field, people will give numbers anywhere from 5 percent to 80 percent. But in every case, it's a lot greater than it was 10 years ago. And it's going up. Someone told me that about 20 or 25 percent of the information in his field was available with open access. But he said I should have asked him, "Of the information that you use, what percentage is available through open access?" It's about 80 percent, he said. The stuff that's available with open access, he uses. The stuff that he has to go out and get with special permissions doesn't get used. That, to me, was very revealing. Nowadays, if you're having a discussion with a colleague, and the question of copyright comes up, you can turn to your computer and look at the exact wording of the U.S. Code, as happened when a colleague and I were having such a discussion. We looked up Section 407 of the copyright law, and away we went. We would never have gone to a library. Ease of access leads to use. Q. One university is developing subscription-based Web sites on the premise that some of the best research is not available free on the Web. A. I think that [premise] is false. You merely have to go out and look at the Internet and see how many superb things are there with open access. Some are funded by the government. Q. Do you think, within this decade, that digital libraries will replace traditional research libraries in most disciplines? A. I think it may be possible to have substantial research programs without access to conventional libraries. In many fields already, there is what you might call the official literature, which is basically controlled by journal publishers or a few book publishers. It's expensive, and if you don't belong to a rich organization, you essentially don't have access to it. But there are also many key papers available online, put on a Web site by the author or, unofficially, by a third party. A friend of mine who is building up a reading list discovered that in her field, which is man-machine interaction, she was able to find -- online and with open access -- all of the seminal papers she wanted for an advanced-level course. Most of them were put up on people's Web sites, unofficially, often without the permission of the publishers. But the publishers are not going to sue faculty members and force them to remove their papers. In many ways, I think the most important thing in scientific publishing has been the Los Alamos physics archive under the leadership of Paul Ginsparg. All important physics research gets published first on that archive. It developed at a time when there were no alternatives, and the high-energy-physics community, which had always been in the habit of circulating working papers, started using an e-mail-based service to distribute papers. From that it grew to cover large chunks of physics and related disciplines. I'm also a great believer that one should watch what's happening in the Web mainstream, because so much good stuff is happening there. For example, Yahoo.com is being used for the sorts of things that people used to use public libraries for. If you want to know something about jobs in your town, or you want to get tax forms, or you have a medical problem and you want information about it, or you want to decide what car to buy next, people used to go to the public library. People, of course, still go to public libraries. But for even more people, their first instinct is to turn to Yahoo.com. Amazon.com is another splendid example of open-access information. There is Books in Print, very expensive and very profitable. And it used to have a monopoly. Nowadays, all that information is available at Amazon.com, and so you have open access competing with the traditional, for-payment product. Amazon.com doesn't put that information up because it's a philanthropic organization. It's part of the company's marketing, but it's a first-class source of information. I use it all the time for checking references and citations, and even occasionally for buying books. The point is, Yahoo.com and Amazon.com are important, open-access library services. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

Gore pledges to make education his No. 1 priority California looks at broad expansion of need-based student-aid program Texas A&M bars anti-gay bias for a few hours, and then changes its mind Voted the top party school, Louisiana State U. sees no cause for celebration Russia's president calls for new efforts to improve science and stem brain drain "Open access" is the wave of the information future, scholar says New Zealand scholars give away multimedia software for online learning