The University of Southampton has recently made all its academic and scientific research output freely available online. The University’s ePrints service is a searchable archive of peer-reviewed research papers by scholars and scientists. Southampton has been using the ePrints system on an experimental basis since 2002. Now, its “Information Repository” will become “an integral part of the research infrastructure of the institution.”
The material available on ePrints would customarily be published in scholarly journals. The best research is published in the most prestigious journals - who often also hold copyright on it - and so only through subscription to these journals, or through the purchase of individual articles, can other academics obtain this information. This may sound surprisingly restrictive, but it’s necessary to appreciate the importance of guaranteeing the quality of the research. When an article is submitted for publication, it goes through what is known as a “peer-review": experts in the field read through the paper to confirm its accuracy and judge its significance. Peer-review, essentially, is a form of quality control. That quality comes at a price, though, and it’s a price that not all libraries (and even fewer individuals) can afford to pay.
Open Access, as the name suggests, aims to reverse that, by making academic papers easily available online. However, there are several issues that could be detrimental to the initative. Because research papers are to be submitted online for insertion into ePrints, it seems possible that peer-review could be avoided, and that could be detrimental to the overall quality of the archive. This is certainly not the intention of the ePrints system, though. The FAQ for the ePrints software even specifically states that “it is not directed at freeing the literature from peer review". Alongside such difficulties are the copyright issues that emerge when an already-published article is republished in another place. No doubt Southampton have already come up with solutions to these problems; they are, after all, hosting workshops for others interested in developing “large-scale Open Access projects".
On Friday we reported on Open Source in Venezuela; today Open Access in Southampton. Both projects have their fair share of obstacles to overcome, but could spearhead radically different attitudes to digital rights and the cost of information. 2005 could be the year in which digital divides will be replaced by open doors.