Peter Suber’s predictions for 2004

Citation

(2004), "Peter Suber’s predictions for 2004", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 32 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2004.12232bab.019

Peter Suber’s predictions for 2004

Peter Suber’s predictions for 2004

Of all the effusions on Open Access Peter Suber’s are the most thoughtful. We reproduce highlights of:

Here let me look forward to 2004. It’s only fun if you let me be wrong. So with your permission:

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   The major objections to OA journals will be that processing fees exclude poor authors, corrupt peer review, and constitute an “untested” business model. The major objections to OA archives will be that widespread archiving will kill subscription-based journals and that easy access to unrefereed preprints will endanger public health. All are answerable, but they won’t go away any time soon. Still, there is progress: these were not the most common objections we heard three years ago. The new objections are more specific and more amenable to empirical evidence.

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   The need for empirical evidence will be met by a growing number of studies and surveys of OA journals.

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   Large, for-profit, non-academic search engines like Google, Yahoo, and the new Microsoft contender will realize that OA is in their interest and join the alliance fighting for it.

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   More journals will experiment with OA, especially through embargo periods, hybrid models, and priced add-ons.

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   We’ll see more OA initiatives in the humanities.

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   We’ll see more initiatives to provide OA to raw and semi-raw data, not just to articles that analyze or interpret data.

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   There will be more struggle over the exact definition of the term “open access”.

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   There will be less unity in the OA movement, or at least less concern to preserve solidarity in every public discussion.

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   Universities will start to make systematic commitments to open access, not just on institutional eprint repositories but on a wider range of issues such as locally launched journals, locally hosted conferences, and locally approved theses and dissertations.

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   Government funding agencies will start to catch up with private foundations in supporting some form of OA, such as paying processing fees charged by OA journals or requiring the deposit of funded research in OA archives.

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   There will be more cancellations of expensive journals and more defections from the bundling deals offered by major publishers.

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   The many different wings of the larger information commons movement – open access research, open source software, copyright and patent reform, spectrum reform, anti-filtering campaigns – will work together more often and more successfully on common interests.

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   Amazon’s Search Inside the Book will prove that free online full-text triggers a net increase in the sale of books, even if the free access is only for searching and not reading.

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   Finally, the sheer volume of news about open access will continue to grow rapidly.

This is good for OA, but alarming for someone whose job is to track this news, digest it, and offer some perspective on it.

A sentiment shared by us all! (Ed.)

Source: SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Feb 4 2004 at: www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter