Subject: Re: tc-list Open Access, (Jim)

From: Patrick Durusau <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 10:22:01 -0400

Jim,

I am not overly troubled by elitism, particularly if it is based upon
merit, but the barriers of distance and funding have little to do with
scholarly merit. And I don't think there is a correlation between
physical location or resources and being "qualified to know enough in
order to properly assess and utilize materials." But I would also argue
that "elitist" is not the term to use for those who would restrict
access to materials they did not author, in most cases which they did
not film or preserve, and for which they play no scholarly role but only
that of guardian.

> It promotes scholarship and hinders dilettantism for one simple reason--
> people only value what they have to pay for.  And people only pay for
> something they really value.  By "pricing" such objects one insures that
> only those genuinely interested in them will bother with them.
>
> But why should not everyone be free to "bother with them"?  Again, to put it
> simply, not everyone is equally qualified to know enough in order to
> properly assess and utilize materials.
>
> To be brief- those who have devoted their lives, education, and resources to
> the study of a certain thing should make use of whatever resources they wish
> to; those who are mere dabblers should not.  Elitist?  Absolutely.
> Practical?  Again, absolutely.  Let the rest be sastisifed with the
> distillations- because, frankly, they cant make use of the more important
> resources anyway.
>
> To put it perfectly bluntly- why should someone who cannot read Hebrew be
> allowed to receive a film of Leningrad?  What can they possibly do with it?
> Why should a person who cannot read Greek receive a film of P52 (or
> whatever)?  And why should they have access to it?
>

Contrast your position with "The NRAO VLA Sky Survey" (Condon, Cotton,
Greisen, Yin, Perley, Taylor, Broderick, p.2) access policy which reads
in full:

****

All NVSS results are available to the entire astronomical community. The
survey team reserves no proprietary rights to either the raw data or the
final data products because we believe that the scientific potential of
large surveys can be realized only if all astronomers have full and
immediate access to them. To encourage use of the NVSS, we have adopted
the following policies for NVSS results: (1) Any astronomer may access
the uncalibrated VLA "archive" data immediately, without waiting for the
usual one year proprietary-data period to end. (2) Our calibrated (u, v)
data and uncorrected snapshot images are likewise available for copying
at any time. (3) The principal data products of interest to most users -
the corrected 4" x 4" images, the catalog of sources found on them, plus
software for their use and any updates - are being released via the
World Wide Web (Condon et. al. 1998) as soon as they are made and
verified. The NVSS team members have agreed to use only these
electronically released results for their own research. (Note that I
replaced the degree symbol in the original with the double quote mark
for email purposes.) This entire document can be found in postscript
format (68 pages) at: http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~jcondon/nvss.html.)

****

I am sure that dabblers will access this data, and in fact the site
offers software for non-serious (in a serious number crunching sense)
platforms such as Macintosh and Windows 95 to view this data. Dabblers
don't hurt serious research and when the data is made available over the
WWW there is not even the argument of inconvenience to sustain a
restriction on access.

The question of access is not "And why should they have access to it?"
but does denying anyone, dabbler or not, serve the ends of scholarship?
I suspect that those concerned with being denied access are not mere
dabblers (since dabblers would not particularly care) but actual
scholars interested in the materials. I can't help but feel your
position, perhaps unintentionally, tends to support those who would make
access to materials a matter of status rather than scholarly merit.

As is evident from my posts I prefer open access as I defined it earlier
and to let the scholarly community decide through its normal peer review
practices what is or is not serious scholarship. That position allows
the merit of research, analysis or presentation to come to the fore
whereas now scholarship sometimes depends upon the whim and caprice of
the inheritors of scholarly data.

Patrick

--
Patrick Durusau
Information Technology Services
Scholars Press
[email-masked]
Manager, ITS