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Information Literacy Needs Open Access or: Open Access is not Only for Researchers

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Digital Libraries: Supporting Open Science (IRCDL 2019)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 988))

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Abstract

The Open Access was initially (blandly) conceived in view not only of researchers but also of lay readers, then this perspective slowly faded out. The Information Literacy movement wants to teach citizens how to arrive at trustable information but the amount of paywalled knowledge is still big. So, their lines of development are somehow complementary: Information Literacy needs Open Access for the citizens to freely access high quality information while Open Access truly fulfils its scope when it is conceived and realized not only for the researchers (an aristocratic view which was the initial one) but for the whole society.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    At the date of 15 November 2018.

  2. 2.

    AGID is the Italian State agency “Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale”.

  3. 3.

    The reference is to the statement “Information Literacy …is a basic human right in a digital world and promotes social inclusion of all nations” which is part of the IFLA Alexandria Proclamation on Information Literacy and Lifelong Learning of 2005, https://www.ifla.org/publications/beacons-of-the-information-society-the-alexandria-proclamation-on-information-literacy.

  4. 4.

    The reference is to “exercise their civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights; be economically active, productive and innovative; learn and apply new skills; enrich cultural identity and expression; take part in decision-making and participate in an active and engaged civil society”, in the Lyon Declaration on Access to Information and Development of 2014, https://www.lyondeclaration.org/.

  5. 5.

    For example, competence in statistics is needed when medical data are under scrutiny: how the data are collected, with which criteria, what do they describe, what do they imply. Hence for example: US medical data describing the outcome of a therapy for an illness can be directly meant to describe the outcome for EU patients?

  6. 6.

    We can think of a variety of places (physical and digital) and activities like courses, workshops, MOOCs undoubtedly useful.

  7. 7.

    Health literacy is the most frequently mentioned literacy in the titles of European institutions publications.

  8. 8.

    Every researcher feels that the data s/he produced are their own – be it only until the data are used for a publication, what has a strict relation with the concept of intellectual property and authorship. One could think that data are not fully comparable to an original creative intellectual product because they would be a property of things which comes to evidence. Nevertheless, data are the product of a “question” asked by the researcher on the basis of her/his original creative intellectual construct describing the state of things s/he is studying, so an approach to data as intellectual property is legitimate.

  9. 9.

    Crowdsourcing scientific activities (like collaborative transcription of ancient manuscripts; tagging of historical pictures; and so on) is not relevant in this respect, as no one of the participants will write a scientific paper on the texts they transcribed. Someone else, a scholar, will do that, taking profit of the work of the transcribers.

  10. 10.

    The “terza missione” of the University, as it is called in Italy, that is “la valorizzazione e il trasferimento delle conoscenze verso il contesto socio-economico” doesn’t escape the approach where the focus is on the transmission of knowledge, not on the education which allows people to individually and autonomously build knowledge.

  11. 11.

    The Cochrane collaboration is a no-profit initiative for producing high-quality, relevant, accessible systematic reviews of scientific literature so allowing to make health decisions through high-quality information. They work mainly with scientific journals.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dip. di Studi Umanistici, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli, Italy

    Maurizio Lana

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  1. Maurizio Lana
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Correspondence to Maurizio Lana .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Italian National Research Council, Pisa, Italy

    Paolo Manghi

  2. Italian National Research Council, Pisa, Italy

    Leonardo Candela

  3. University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Gianmaria Silvello

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Lana, M. (2019). Information Literacy Needs Open Access or: Open Access is not Only for Researchers. In: Manghi, P., Candela, L., Silvello, G. (eds) Digital Libraries: Supporting Open Science. IRCDL 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 988. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11226-4_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11226-4_19

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