JISC has published an interview with Colin Steele, Director of Scholarly Information Strategies at the Australian National University (March 18, 2004). Excerpts, all quoting Steele:
ePrints are only part of the wider repository debate. It is quite clear that the main issue in populating repositories is a cultural and political one and not a technical issue. This has been reinforced by the presentations at the third OAI conference in Geneva and the Open Access conference in Southampton on February 19. There is a mismatch between the zeal of the open access advocates...and the vast majority of the academic community. I've called this the sound of one hand clapping! [...]
I see ePrints and ePresses as being part of a seamless process. The work of Dr Roy Tennant at California needs to be recognised here as providing a future model through California's eScholarship as well as the Columbia eGutenberg project. As long as one can search in a federated manner then a repository can hold all manner of material for example peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed, grey literature, digital theses, free electronic monographs and commercial books. [...]
The debate on open access is a huge and confused one. Just to keep up with the writings of Professor Stevan Harnad and Professor Peter Suber's Open Access Bloglet is almost a fulltime job! The response of publishers to the current UK House of Commons Inquiry reflects a myriad of views towards the Open Access issue but we are still in very early days. I would think for Elsevier that Open Access is still only a very small cloud flitting across the blue sky of profits. Until the academic community become involved in the debate at an individual or institutional level I feel that, despite the publicity, that the ground is only going to shift slowly.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/19/2004 11:41:00 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.
