The official memorandum from the provosts of Duke U, North Carolina State U, and U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the faculties of the same three universities is now online. Excerpt: "As many of you know, the member universities of the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) have decided to discontinue the consortial arrangement by which they provided access to electronic journals published under the Elsevier Science imprint....The breakdown of negotiation with Elsevier is only the most extreme symptom of a much larger problem. Academic libraries across the country have faced escalating costs to sustain the scholarly communication system for years. The Association of Research Libraries reports that, over the past fifteen years, serial costs for member libraries have increased 215% while the Consumer Price Index has increased by only 62%....In the immediate term, our libraries will work with you to minimize the impact of this particular decision on your research and teaching....At the same time, they will begin to explore with you new models of scholarly communication that may, in the long term, help reduce costs and make scholarly information more widely available." (Thanks to Gary Price.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/16/2004 02:10:00 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.
