EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020

"Ultimately, this decision comes as a result of a meeting by the Competitiveness Council,which includes the ministers of Science, Innovation, Trade, and Industry."

EU science, being what it is, needs to be more competitive. One way to become competitive in the face American or even Japanese competition is to take the open source/free software route and make research freely available. This makes the research more accessible, unburdens relatively poor European universities from having to pay expensive journal memberships, increases the ability of EU institutions to collaborate, and allows the EU to attract collaborators from abroad by removing financial thresholds. And because science in the US has stronger ties to industry, it plays an important role in determining the economic prowess of the US. Poor entrepreneurs can also benefit from the move. The EU is likely aiming in a similar direction (though I personally know members of European academia who dislike the collaboration between academia and industry).

You would be surprised at how easily a winners win situation happens in research. The citation based search would reinforce it. And while the gaming may not be search engine focused, I think getting the best papers via algorithmic methods can omit the crown jewels through less insidious (but quite common) issues such as citation graphs which orient in the direction of the flow of funding.

But you say, maybe winners win for a reason. This is only personal experience, but the single most profound, creative paper I ever read during my years of research was written by a lone wolf (i.e. no collaborators) in a somewhat unknown institution who turned out to be a sort of one hit wonder. This person's h-index may very well have been exactly 1 at that time. I honestly think algorithmic methods of searching for literature would have skipped past that paper.

You could make the case, though, that a thorough literature survey should be as exhaustive as possible and not omit ANYTHING. Well, very few people are that thorough - and even when they are, there is a tendency of reading papers from the most popular authors first. I am just glad I did my work before the days of Google Scholar becoming the de facto starting point, and I did not have the bias of a pre-ranked list.

I think that is the actual fear: I was able to find this crown jewel precisely because the publishing process at that period was more centralized (although quite likely also less competitive), and that paper was eventually published at a pre-eminent conference - which is how it came to my attention. With a search-engine driven open access, I think this lone wolf would have had a harder time getting that fantastic piece of work in front of a big audience because many of the common signals would have been too weak.

With all that said, when open access becomes more pervasive, great search technology will be a big part of the cost reduction and I definitely look forward to that.