Yesterday ebrary announced an Institutional Repository Pilot Program. According to the press release, ebrary subscribers will have access to tools for "cost-effectively" creating an open-access repository for institutional theses and dissertations, technical reports, research articles, teaching materials, and other documents. The repositories would integrate with other library databases and licensed services, offer searching within and across documents, and allow users to highlight words and turn them into links to relevant information ("definitions, biographical information, maps, translations and more"). Ebrary will give early adopters 500 megabytes for each repository. (PS: Congratulations to ebrary for building another path to open-access archives and giving it some interesting new features. On the other hand, ebrary subscribers, and especially non-subscribers, should understand that there are already three open-source packages for building and maintaining open-access institutional repositories: Eprints (from Southampton), DSpace (from MIT), and CDSWare (from CERN). Moreover, these open-source packages create interoperable archives that comply with the standards of the Open Archives Initiative, on which ebrary is silent.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/29/2003 03:45:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
