Stephen Pinfield and Hamish James, The Digital Preservation of e-Prints, D-Lib Magazine, September 2003. Excerpt: "Digital information is lost when it is left unattended while hardware, software and media continue to develop. Without intervention, an e-print may be subject to media degradation within a few years. Even if the e-print is securely backed-up, a few more years will see the e-print's content become inaccessible as software and hardware change. Without a strong institutional commitment, institutional e-print repositories will be unable to preserve their holdings, and they may also struggle to convince faculty to deposit work. At present the apparent assumption among parts of the e-print community is that decisions about preservation can be left until later, but this does not fit well with much advice on digital preservation, which emphasises taking action early in the life-cycle of an electronic resource to make it simpler and less expensive to maintain in the future. Nevertheless, repository managers should not lose sight of the immediate importance of filling the repositories. There is certainly no reason to delay moving forward on this issue."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/17/2003 11:01:00 AM.
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.
