Walt Crawford, The Dangers of Uniformity, American Libraries, October 2004. Excerpt: "Similarly, single solutions may be tempting answers to problems, but they’re usually dangerous and unrealistic answers. A monolithic solution is likely to cause more problems than it solves --and it's not likely to replace the current situation. The main danger with most monolithic futures and single solutions is that people put too much faith in the power of a single future. When you stop buying print journals because the future is all-digital, the next step may be for your university president to decide that all of the future is digital, so who needs a library? If a library chose to stop acquiring print books because e-books are the future, it would be out of business long before e-books became a significant part of the overall book market (which they probably will, at least within niches). Many of us want to see open access cause serious changes in scientific, technical, and medical article publishing—but insisting on or assuming a future in which all sci-tech publishing is open access is both improbable and problematic....Avoid the dangers of uniformity. Look for multiplicity whenever it’s possible. It works for your collections; it should also work for technological and media futures."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/28/2004 05:37:00 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.
