Richard Poynder, Institutional Repositories, and a little experiment, Open and Shut, March 1, 2006. This is another of Richard's elegant, detailed, and comprehensive articles --and almost impossible to excerpt. Read the whole thing. On his experiment:
While I am keen to continue writing about OA, and in a way that will enable me to maximise the number of people who can read what I write, it would clearly be helpful if I could earn a little money from that writing too! To this end I have decided to try a little experiment: to self-publish some of my articles about OA via my blog, and then invite readers to pay to read them. No has to pay to read them, but those who find some value in doing so, and feel they would like to help, can do — on a strictly voluntary basis. I am publishing the first such article today. This looks at the history of the institutional repository, and its relation to the OA movement....
In the substantive part of the paper, Poynder traces the history of IRs, disentangling the many different problems they have been proposed to solve, from the affordability of journal literature and digital preservation to the impact of research. He covers a lot of ground but focuses on the contributions of Raym Crow, Paul Ginsparg, Stevan Harnad, Clifford Lynch, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), the NIH public-access policy, the draft RCUK policy, and the OA mandates in place at a handful of universities around the world. He concludes that the OA mission for IRs is being lost in a confusing welter of other missions, some more attractive to non-research stakeholders and all of them more expensive and more difficult to achieve. "The danger, therefore, is that unless the self-archiving movement puts some clear blue water between itself and the mists of confusion enveloping the institutional repository it could end up shipwrecked."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/01/2006 10:15:00 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.
