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Sociological implications of scientific publishing: Open access, science, society, democracy, and the digital divide Ulrich Herb. First Monday , Volume 15, Number 2 - 1 February 2010 Claims for open access are mostly underpinned with science–related arguments (open access accelerates scientific communication); financial arguments (open access relieves the serials crisis); social arguments (open access reduces the digital divide); democracy–related arguments (open access facilitates participation); and, socio–political arguments (open access levels disparities). Using sociological concepts and notions, this article focuses strongly on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of (scientific) capital and its implications for the acceptance of open access, Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis and the implications of open access for the concept of the digital divide. Bourdieu’s theory of capital implies that the acceptance of open access depends on the logic of power and the accumulation of ...

As yet another newspaper "gets it" and launches an API (" Open Platform ") to its content (" Newspaper as a Platform: Guardian Launches API" - ReadWriteWeb), leveraging the creativity of the masses for the creation of mashups, mixins and just plain wonderful and wonky applications, I can only hope that the holders of significant scientific content, like scientific publishers and aggregators, will also move in this direction. Nature's OTMI seems a rather Web 1.0 inspired effort, and with limited usability at that (although Nature has stopped working on OTMI). Exposing research article contents (full text, metadata, citations, datasets, ontologies, etc) - even it be 6+ months old - to the world through a sensible (and maybe even shared/standard) API would create an explosion of mashups ranging from incredible researcher-oriented knowledge discovery tools to normal human being-oriented applications for finding things like as-yet-unreported possible da...

Rod Page 's demo for his Elsevier Grand Challenge submission (" Towards realising Darwin’s dream: setting the trees free ") shows the type of enrichment of biological - if not all research - articles that is quickly becoming possible. Taking a published article (" Mitochondrial paraphyly in a polymorphic poison frog species (Dendrobatidae; D. pumilio "), various additional biological, geographical and other metadata are extracted and added to a web page for the article. These include: Map showing all localities mentioned in the paper, with their enclosing polygon List of other studies which have samples in area enclosed by the study polygon Each of the following are linked through to their underlying databases (such as NIH accession number and NCBI nucleotide viewer or linked to ubio taxonomic name viewer record: List of sequence features (such as genes) in the article List of taxa sequenced in the article List of gene sequences cited by the article An image c...

I am following with a sense of detached fascination UBC researcher Dr. Rosie Redfield's saga of her quest to get her CIHR funded article published in a scientific journal and also made available Open Access . While her blog is not one dedicated to Open Access but instead to her research (" Thinking about our research into the mechanism, function and evolution of DNA uptake by Haemophilus influenzae and other bacteria "), it is clear that she is spending more time and accruing more frustration dealing with this particular issue than she would want to be, or should be... Update: 2008 Nov 12 : It seems that the Dr. Redfield has given up on Elsevier, and has decided to stop publishing articles with this publisher: " ... I won't be submitting to any Elsevier journals in the future ."