Eight of the worlds major natural history and botanical libraries are working together to develop a strategy and operational plan to digitize the published literature on biodiversity that they jointly hold and make it freely accessible to all on the Web. The project, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, will establish a major corpus of publications drawn from each of their collections. Much of the published literature is rare or has limited global distribution and is available in only a few select libraries. From a scholarly perspective, these collections are of exceptional value because the domain of systematic biology depends --more than any other science-- on historic literature.
The eight participating libraries have more than 2 million volumes of biodiversity literature collected over 200 years to support scientists and students throughout the world. Until now, this body of biodiversity knowledge effectively has been unavailable for wide use in a broad range of applications, including research, education, taxonomic study, biodiversity conservation, protected area management, disease control and maintenance of diverse ecosystems. The participants are:
Smithsonian Institution Libraries and the National Museum of Natural History, Washington
American Museum of Natural History, New York
Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Mass.
Harvard University Botany Libraries, Cambridge, Mass.
Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis
The Natural History Museum, London
The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, N.Y.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Surrey
The participating organizations will work with the global taxonomic community, rights holders and other interested parties to ensure that their collective historical heritage is available to all who seek it. Web-based access to the collections will provide a substantial benefit to people living and working in the developing world who have not been able to benefit from the information held in these collections.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/03/2006 12:52:00 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.
