EC report calls for more OA content

Critics say emphasis on interoperability tools ignores lack of proposals on making content more freely available

Linking and markup technologies must be promoted if open access is to become more widely adopted, according to one of the recommendations of the EC report on scientific publishing, released last month. But critics have slammed the recommendation, saying it is ‘putting the cart before the horse’.

Recommendation A5 of Study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publications market in Europe states that the European Commission should support R &D on interoperability issues such as meta-data and the XML format.

It also says the EC should be promoting the wide implementation of linking technologies, especially the open standard OpenURL, and interoperable standard protocols, especially the OAI-PMH.

Stevan Harnad, OA champion, said the EC had got things the wrong way round. “A5 is about fostering interoperable tools to improve visibility. But without the content, there’s nothing to be made visible.”

“Developing the tools is the easy part. The tools we already have are already far more powerful than the sparse Open Access content on which they are used. There are some search engines, such as citebase , that are already nuclear weapons, but they have nothing to deploy on but a flea while the IRs are near-empty.”

The EC report suggests that funding might be forthcoming for linking and interoperability development through its infrastructure planning. But Harnad warned: “This is not only putting the cart before the horse, but blocking the path of the horse [OA content provision] if energies and focus are diverted to building tools for doing ever more powerful things with nonexistent content, instead of focussing all energies on bringing the content into existence.”

Peter Suber, open access policy strategist, believes the XML recommendation will help interoperability in the long term. “But it could be a barrier to self archiving if it was made a pre-requisite as the author has to spend time marking it up,” he said.

Suber said the next big step in interoperability is full-text harvesting. “We need to get agencies that fund research to make open access a condition of that research.”