In his latest talk with with prominent open access advocates
Richard Poynder is talking to Dr Alma Swan. It's a
fascinating
and scary picture that is presented.
In the late fifties Mao Zedong introduced that Great Leap
and now
fifty years later we are going to take a giant leap
according to
Dr Swan.
In China backyard steel furnances would do the job; in Dr
Swans
world it's the mandate and local institutional repository
that is
going to change the world away from big industry and the
capitalist society.
Open Access is inevitable according to Dr Swan, as once
Socialism
was. Mandate is the key to the Open Access World.
Instead of Five Year Plans we will have Metrics to see to it
that
the way forward is the Green Way.
The commissars overlooking that the Giant Leap will happen
is
"Pro-Vice- Chancellors" at the universities, the
real
reprsentatives of the research communities.
A citatation from Wikipedia:
These reforms (sometimes now referred to as /The Little Leap
Forward/) were generally unpopular with the peasants and
usually
implemented by summoning them to meetings and making them
stay
there for days and sometimes weeks until they
"voluntarily"
agreed to join the collective.
A citation by Dr Swan:
AS: Mandates are essential for lots of reasons. One reason
is
that they make researchers aware of Open Access where they
weren't before. The level of ignorance is still very high.
And if
their university suddenly requires them to do something it
will
focus researchers' minds. More mportantly, of course, a
mandate
will actually make them do it, because regardless of the
Open
Access Advantage, they won't put their research into a
repository
if they don't have to. It's another bureaucratic thing to
do. And
they still have worries about the legality of it. Being told
by
their institution to do it gives them the feeling that it is
safe
and sensible to do it. So to make them do it you need to
tell
them that they have to!
Richard Poynder's comment:
Dr Swan has a clear eye for what is needed
How will the future be?
AS: Once the content and the infrastructure are in place we
are
going to see knowledge take a giant leap. The way to view it
is
that the last 7-8,000 years or so of human civilisation's
struggle for knowledge has taken place on one plane,
determined
and constrained by what our own brains can absorb, put
together
and make sense of: now we are about to move to another plane
altogether, with the help of machine brains.
>From profit makers to machine brains, what a future!
Jan
Jan Szczepanski
Forste bibliotekarie
Goteborgs universitetsbibliotek
E-mail: Jan.Szczepanski ub.gu.se
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