Yahoo and Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Sumir Meghani wrote:

> I'd love to hear your thoughts on how Yahoo! can potentially help in
> encouraging open-access.
> http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/040302/25391_1.html

The Open Access (OA) movement is focussed specifically on articles in
peer-reviewed journals. Most OA content is OAI-compliant:
http://www.openarchives.org/
because it appears in OAI-compliant institutional or central Eprint
Archives:
http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/
http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php

Two things Yahoo could do to encourage OA are:

(1) Put a parameter in the Yahoo search that allows a user to restrict search to
only the OAI-compliant Eprint Archives. (As OA content grows, this will make such
OAI-specific searches the equivalent of searching only the peer-reviewed journal
literature.)

(2) Consider ranking this OAI-specific search by citation
links instead of just ordinary links, as citebase does:
http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search

There will be other things to do soon, but these two would already be very
useful innovations.

Stevan Harnad

NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
        To join the Forum: 
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
        Post discussion to: 
    american-scientist-open-access-forum at amsci.org
        Hypermail Archive: 
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html

Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
    BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
            journal whenever one exists.
            http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
    BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
            toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
            http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
    http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
    http://www.eprints.org/signup/