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.

The Register reports today on a plan to move Venezuela’s government IT systems - from central government to the municipal level - to Open Source software. It’s a big move, and one that will take some time - up to two years in some cases. Intriguingly, an almost identical proposal was made in 2002, but never came to fruition - perhaps in part because of a letter from the Initiative for Software Choice, a coaltion of companies including Microsoft and Intel, warning the Venezuelan government of the problems Open Source could bring.

Open Source software is free to use and distribute, and so represents a huge saving for a small nation such as Venezuela. Venezuelanalysis.com, in this report, quotes former minister of Planning and Development, Felipe Perez Marti, as saying that the Vnezuelan government spent $7.5m on software licensing fees in 2004 - money that would be saved after a move to Open Source. And a move to Open Source benefits the internal economy, too. Instead of paying foreign companies such as Microsoft license fees, Venezuelan software firms and developers will instead be paid to develop software for government offices. There’s already an Open Source software industry in Venezuela, and the country even has its own Academy of Open Source Software, in Merida.

Open Source has many advantages, but large-scale migration to it, especially for governments, is a tricky proposal. Much commercial software, especially more specialised or esoteric products, have no Open Source equivalents, and so replacements have to be written from scratch. Re-training staff can also prove costly.

Could Open Source be a valid prospect for UK government? Perhaps. The Office of Government Commerce published a report last October into the viability of Open Source software for government. The report was positive; whilst not by any means recommending blanket deployment (as in Venezuela), the report suggested that in certain situations and environments, Open Source may be better or cheaper than commerical products. Several government bodies are already using Open Source software very successfully, on both workstations and servers. Where Open Source falls down is fitting into the eGov Interoperability Framework (eGIF), which is obviously crucial for any UK e-government project. Venezuela, with its comparatively simpler government IT systems, may just pull off the move to Open Source.

In the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, SMS (text) messages emerged as an efficient and powerful communication tool. One of the primary advantages of SMS is that messages can often get through even when the signal is too weak to make a voice call, often making them the most accessible means of communication for those affected. Now, as focus shifts towards preventing (or at least limiting) such catastrophes in future, people are beginning to examine the possibility of a centralised text messaging system. The system would take the form of a central server, whereby a message sent to the server would be immediately redistributed (via either email or SMS) to relevant individual agencies.

Now, Taran Rampersand, a Trinidadian, and Dan Lane, a British text messaging guru, are creating such a system, which they call the Alert Retrieval Cache. The potential benefits are obvious. Mr Rampersand said: “Imagine if an aid worker in the field spotted a need for water purification tablets, and had a central place to send a text message to that effect. He can message the server, so the server can send out an e-mail message and human or machine moderators can e-mail aid agencies and get it out in the field. Or, send it at the same time to other people who are using SMS in the region, and they might have an excess of it, and be able to shift supplies to the right places.”

The idea for the system stemmed from the devastation caused by Hurricane Ivan in the Caribbean and US last September. It seems unfortunate that it takes disasters of such magnitude to force people into taking these issues seriously.

Videogaming and blindness do not tend to form an obvious association. Any attempts to make videogames accessible to the visually impaired have previously focused on ways in which standard games can be ‘read’ by the blind. But now, some producers have begun to create audio games - games based predominantly on aural rather than visual stimuli. There are currently around 200 titles, of which about 50 are commercial (the others are freeware or shareware).

Naturally, games based on sonic environments require a different approach on the part of developers. Certain elements are vital, according to Kelly Sapergia, who reviews audio games for the Canadian radio station ACB: “They need to have really distinctive sounds so that you can easily tell where you are,” he said. “This can be achieved using different ambient music and having the footsteps change depending on whether you’re on grass or mud.” One of the companies working in this field is Bavisoft, who make software exclusively for the blind and visually impaired. Bavisoft utilises sound engineers, musicians and vocal talent as well as programmers in order to create a fully interactive sound-based experience. There is hope that these games will also start appealing to sighted gamers.

However, the market is currently tiny, even among the visually impaired. It is estimated that around 3,000 audio games were sold in 2004 – a figure dwarfed by the millions of sales of conventional games. Richard van Tol, who jointly runs Audiogames.net, feels that the problem is public awareness: “Loads of blind people have computers, but not many of them know about audio games.” This is a shame, as these games are an example of a truly innovative approach to accessibility - it would be of greater benefit to the visually impaired if more companies employed similarly original techniques rather than relying on the same tired methods.