Miriam A. Drake, Institutional Repositories: Hidden Treasures, Searcher (May 2004). Drake offers a thorough evaluation of the range and kinds of academic institutional repositories. She covers repositories' archival functions, models and standards such as the open archives initiative, kinds of repositories such as DSpace and California's escholarship program, as well as software such as EPrints. The author also digs into questions of how repositories can be used by faculty and researchers, policy questions, legal issues such as copyright, collaboration with other insitutions and funding. One section, "Effect on Publishing," speaks to the complementary roles of repositories and open access:
Institutional repositories and the open access movement will affect the publishing business. Each day, it becomes clearer and clearer that academic institutions, corporations, and other organizations will no longer pay the prices charged by scholarly publishers.
Players in the open access movement and builders of repositories have reacted to high journal prices by beginning plans to disaggregate the structure of scholarly publishing, to eliminate or curtail the distance between author and reader, to disintermediate.
Posted by
Garrett at 4/30/2004 03:38:00 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.
