The Open Citation Project (http://opcit.eprints.org/) has played a major role in this reinvigoration of open access as founder members of important initiatives, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and latterly the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)2, that span the lifetime of the project from 1999 to 2002. The legacy of the project is not simply advocacy, but real practical tools and services: GNU EPrints archive-creating software (http://software.eprints.org/), and Citebase (http://citebase.eprints.org/), “Google for the refereed literature”.
Open access works because it means that users can access research papers free, and it means that increasingly sophisticated software can be deployed that "will help scholars find what is relevant to their research, what is worthy, and what is new".
Open access works because the costs of electronic storage and maintenance are lower than for print publishing, and can be borne in new ways, in particular by institutions who share with their researchers the benefits of greater visibility and impact. Institutional archives are the way forward for many researchers who do not enjoy the benefits of their colleagues in fields already served by large disciplinary open archives such as arXiv.3,4
Institutional archives can, like disciplinary archives, support unified, global coverage of fields because they are based on the OAI, which has been remarkably successful in motivating a new - and as the name would imply, open - approach to advertising the availability of objects and documents in digital libraries. If digital libraries store records in a form that complies with an acceptable OAI metadata format, then independent services, such as search and indexing services, can collect this data using a protocol defined by OAI.
Now institutions can extend their digital libraries with archives of research papers that comply with the OAI protocol and metadata simply by using GNU EPrints software, which is designed specifically for open access. It works: leading institutions worldwide have written about their experiences with EPrints.5-7
What these institutions most need to do next is attract authors to these archives. The incentive for authors is exemplified by Citebase, a Web-based citation-ranked search and impact discovery service. Citebase indexes OAI-compliant archives in physics, maths, computer science and biomedical science, but mostly it covers physics. That is simply the current implementation. The principle of citation-based navigation and ranking of papers in OAI-compliant open access archives has been proved8 and can be expanded to other OAI archives. According to one user, services such as Citebase "will have to become clearly more pleasant, more informative and more effective than a visit to the library or the use of one's own knowledge of the literature. Much, much more! And I, for one, believe that they are coming quite near to this. But relatively few people realized this until now".
For authors and institutional archives, indexing, impact measurement and discovery services come free with services such as Citebase, and are limited only by the ideas and talents of developers, and by their ability to access the original, raw data.
The BOAI is not alone in bringing attention to open access in 2002. The JISC Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) programme of new projects, which are just underway, includes users of EPrints and Citebase data. Innovations from the Open Citation Project will in this way continue to motivate new and improved tools and services that demonstrate open access archives as a new, widely applicable and powerful mode of dissemination for all scholarly journal papers.
1 Harnad, S., Why I think research access, impact and
assessment are linked, Times Higher Education Supplement, 18th May
2001 http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/thes1.html
2 Noble, I., Boost for research paper access, BBC
Online News, 14 February 2002 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1818652.stm
3 Young, J. R., Superarchives' Could Hold All Scholarly
Output, Chronicle of Higher Education, 5th July 2002
http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i43/43a02901.htm
4 Crow, R., The Case for Institutional Repositories:
A SPARC Position Paper, July 2002
http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html
5 Nixon, W., The evolution of an institutional e-prints
archive at the University of Glasgow, Ariadne, July 2002
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/eprint-archives/
6 Pinfield, S., et al., Setting up an institutional
e-print archive, Ariadne, April 2002
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/
7 Sponsler, E. and Van de Velde, E. F., Eprints.org Software:
A Review, SPARC E-News, Aug.-Sept. 2001 http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=g20#6
8 Hitchcock, S., et al., Evaluating Citebase,
November 2002 http://opcit.eprints.org/evaluation/Citebase-evaluation/evaluation-report.html