In spite of the title, the speakers for this session spoke very little on the concept of Open Access initiatives and instead focused on various public access initiatives of the government. The first speaker was David Gillikin, Head, MEDLARS Management Section NLM; mainly he spoke about efforts like Medline and MedlinePlus. He also gave a short background on various legislative efforts to increase public access to federally-funded research. Specifically, he commented regarding Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 that “publisher reaction has generally been very negative”. And for tat, he gets the “understatement of the year” award.
The next speaker was Selene Delecky, representing the Government Printing Office and speaking about the Future Digital System (FDsys). She commented the GPO started and has existed as a print-based agency. In fact, most of stuff on GPO Access is still a product of the printing system, and was not born digital. However, Federal agencies are not necessarily going to GPO for printing anymore. They are going to independent publishers.
This vision of the Future Digital System (FDsys) is to be a stable digital repository for all Federal docs that are within the scope of Depository program, to ensure public access, to expand the collected documents beyond text-based, and to exist as official master copies. FDsys is intended to shift GPO to a content-centric model (not print-centric). The vision for FDsys is to verify and track versions, assure authenticity, preserve content, and provide permanent public access. The system will be rule-based, policy neutral, modular and adaptable. In response to a question about what it meant to be “policy neutral”, Celine (sp?) clarified that policy development would be reserved for business units; FDsys will not make policy on fees, revisions, etc. It does NOT mean that they will not reflect or defend the changing policies of administrations.
She also commented that the FDsys focuses on what needs to be done, not necessarily on how it will be done. I noticed throughout the session how very carefully she chose her words to reflect the “vision” of FDsys, the “intent” of FDsys, but never said anything really definitive about the program. At the same time, there are definite dates set out for getting things done, with the first version of the FDsys due out in 2007. I asked her afterward about this incongruence and whether or not there was or would be a plan for how they would proceed available to the public. She did note that was no current plan and that they had to wait for the input from their vendor before being able to proceed with a plan. However, she did confirm that, once they have a plan, it will be available for public comment.
With regard to the difficulties of capturing digital-born, Web-based agency documents that are not submitted to GPO, they are currently conducting a Harvesting Pilot using 2 separate harvesting vendors that are simultaneously harvesting publications from EPA Web site (Blue Angel and Information Associates). She noted that on the first pass, they one of the vendors had a 92% (I think) document harvest rate, but a greater than 50% error rate. However, she emphasized that there are 2 more passes planned and they will get better with each pass.
The final speaker was Thomas Lahr, USGS, co-chair of Science.gov. Science.gov is voluntary large scale collaboration among U.S. government agencies (FirstGov for science). Agency involvement is exclusively volunteer and each agency kicks in money as they see fit for the project. It is a Web portal to provide unified access to government science databases and Web sites. Lahr largely spoke about the history of Science.gov. He noted that one of the ongoing projects that they are working on is to try and get science agencies from other countries to collaborate and add their sites to the Science.gov Web portal. One question from the audience was whether or not they had ever considered involving the science departments of the states. Indeed, they had not thought about it, but I swear I saw a light bulb appear over Lahr’s head. I think this may well be a direction we will see in the future.