In an article for the American Scientist Online, Open 
Access and the Progress of Science (May-June 2007), Alma 
Swan, Ph.D. and MBA, consultant from Key perspectives, 
makes a persuasive case for how Open Access (OA) aids the 
progress of science. She cites the numbers that indicate 
that OA articles have greater visibility and stresses that 
behind the numbers collaborations result among scientists 
who didn't know of one another's work before. She cites the 
way OA shortens the research cylce and accelerates 
progress. She talks about how OA advances science by 
enabling semantic computer technologies that already exist 
but need huge numbers of freely accessible scientific 
articles to work on to integrate resources and create new 
information. Similar software searching large chunks of 
free text could also track the evolution of fields and note 
trends, helping managers and policy-makes make better 
decisions. She cites the rapid growth of interdisciplinary 
science which needs OA to flourish becuase traditional 
methods do not work in unconnected fields. And she cites 
the rise of e-science where there are global collaborations 
generating huge quantities of data and needing quick and 
open sharing of such data. Ms. Swan urges authors to use 
self-archiving and repositories to make their work freely 
accessible regardless of where they publish. She believes 
it is the individual investigator who holds the key to 
speeding science along.