Open access in science

Henry Rzepa, Professor of Computational Chemistry, discusses the importance of open access journals in science.

With Open Access Week 2012 taking place from 22–28 October, Henry Rzepa, Professor of Computational Chemistry, discusses the importance of open access journals in science.

“Science journals have been with us a long time – one I’ve seen dates back to 1665 – and for most of that period they have served the community exceedingly well. But after almost 20 years of the internet, we are entitled to ask: is this 350-year-old model still fit for purpose? Is the (closed) subscription journal – almost 10,000 are related to chemistry alone – serving us well? Indeed, can any individual scientist hope to spot the critical developments by simply scanning the tables of contents of a small number of journals relevant to their field and thus risk failing to spot pertinent events beyond that horizon? An alternative twenty-first century model sees the scientific article as part of a semantic web of interlinked data, information and knowledge. Clever querying or mining of this web – by machines working 24/7, if need be – is the future. 

Currently, there are no closed access (non-open) journals that allow an individual anything remotely resembling such activity. Indeed, if the publisher detects attempts to do so, the culprit or their institute will be disbarred from further access. So to learn how to construct, query and use the body of the world’s scientific information in this way, we must have open access to its containers, the journals. We also have to recast ‘the article’ to render it fit for this purpose. One route is via semantically and data-rich ‘datuments’ [a hyperdocument for transmitting and preserving the complete content of a piece of scientific work]; another is increasing use of the open data repository. There are many other interesting ways of rethinking the entire process of communicating our science – visit http://bit.ly/whitesides to hear George Whitesides, Professor of Chemistry at Harvard, talk about his thoughts on this process."