Barbara Quint, Only Libraries, Only Librarians, Searcher, November 1, 2004. Excerpt: "The billions of dollars poured into federal research alone — not to mention all the other value factors involved in research and development efforts, both federal and nonfederal — must mandate that insuring the archiving and accessing of that research is a task requiring information professionals....If institutional repositories become a major source of full-text scientific reportage, then those repositories must be run by librarians as part of library networks. Our job as information professionals now is to step up to this task, to demand its performance as our right and our duty, to show the world that, though we may have missed building Google (AHEM), we will not miss providing the key services to guarantee the archiving and accessing of library-quality data on the Web....Library budgets are large enough now to absorb the cost of the switch to a significantly cheaper delivery system. The transition will cost more, but the outcome will cost a lot less. We need to resolve today to make the moves that get us into position, to study the problems arising from new open access routes, to grapple with those problems without waiting for vendors to handle them for us....If STM publishers actually do start to close down less-revenue-producing publications, the independent quality control provided by editors and peer reviewers from those discontinued publications will have to be replaced. We should start looking at alternative models for independent peer review. Fortunately, this should not cost too much either, since STM publishers have never paid more than chump change for the services that insure the quality of their publications....Storing the work of the human mind so it can be found forever by other human minds is our job as information professionals. Let's get to work. NOW!"
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/01/2004 10:13:00 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.
