Open Access News

Abstract: While the eighties of the last century were a time of local automation for libraries and the nineties the decade in which libraries embraced the Internet and the Web, now is the age in which the big search engines and institutional repositories are gaining a firm footing. This heralds a new era in both the evolution of scholarly communication and its agencies themselves, i.e. the libraries. Until now libraries and publishers have developed a digital variant of existing processes and products, i.e. catalogues posted on the Web, scanned copies of articles, e–mail notification about acquisitions or expired lending periods, or traditional journals in a digital jacket. However, the new OAI repositories and services based upon them have given rise to entirely new processes and products, libraries transforming themselves into partners in setting up virtual learning environments, building an institution’s digital showcase, maintaining academics’ personal Web sites, designing refereed portals and — further into the future — taking part in organising virtual research environments or collaboratories. Libraries are set to metamorphose into ‘libratories’, an imaginary word to express their combined functions of library, repository and collaboratory. In such environments scholarly communication will be liberated from its current copyright bridle while its coverage will be both broader — including primary data, audiovisuals and dynamic models — and deeper, with cross–disciplinary analyses of methodologies and applications of instruments. Universities will make it compulsory to store in their institutional repositories the results of research conducted within their walls for purposes of academic reporting, review committees, and other modes of clarification and explanation. Big search engines will provide access to this profusion of information and organise its mass customization.

From the body of the paper:

Although we may not know exactly what the future information needs will be of the academic community, i.e. students, teachers and researchers, to me one thing is certain: open access to state–of–the–art knowledge is crucial in order for both research and learning environments to succeed. Limited access, be it the result of either technical or juridical implications, impedes solid growth in the human knowledge base. Put another way, there is no point going to great pains to overcome technological obstacles facing ICT only to come up against the legal copyright barriers. An interesting example here is the Elsevier content stored in the e–Depot of the Netherlands National Library: the costly technological infrastructure required for guaranteeing long–term access to this material is renowned. But in order to enjoy this access one has to travel to the library in The Hague and then possibly stand in a queue, as only one person at a time is allowed access — a replica of the situation in the paper era....Authors have to be convinced that depositing is in their own interest. In doing so it is most important to demystify the issue. For example, they need to be told that current research shows that open access publishing increases the number of citations and hence impact factors, that the Romeo site proves that publishers are gradually giving in on copyrights, that experiences of authors, who formulate their own copyright statements, teach us that publishers accept them, that parallel publishing on the Internet stimulates sales of a book’s paper version — and so on and so forth. A project like the Netherlands’ Cream of Science demonstrates that it is possible to overcome the hurdles and make top authors, even Nobel Prize winners, enthusiastic about placing their work in repositories. It has also shown that so–called objections sometimes amount to no more than librarians’ perceptions of author viewpoints. And that it is occasionally impossible to publish the complete oeuvre of an author simply because his or her publications have become lost. This in itself constitutes another powerful argument for depositing materials in repositories.