Earlier this month Michael May announced that nine major works by Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan were now OA at the dLIST repository. In a SOAF posting today, May spells out the connection between Ranganathan's writing and OA:
Anita Coleman, editor of dLIST, has suggested [one, two] that the origins of contemporary OA appear in SRR's Five Laws, originally published in India in 1931.
Likewise, Judith Turner, Editor of Journal of Electronic Publishing, recently argued at a colloquium in Bangalore that the "roots" of OA can be traced to SRR....
In 1996, Finnish scholars Timo Kuronen and Paivi Pekkarinen demonstrated a...link between SRR's Five Laws and OA when they argued that Five Laws could be applied to virtual or digital libraries with the addition of two supplementary laws, "Every reader his library" and "Every writer his contribution to the library" (Herald of Library Science, v. 35 n. 1-2, pp. 3-17). Kuronen and Pekkarinen envisioned a "citizen-centered civil society" in which "the virtual library may make available and accessible information which contradicts with the prevailing societal order."...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/18/2006 11:33:00 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.
