Let us stipulate, for the purpose of discussion, that open access to the scholarly literature is a Good Thing for the individual scholars and for society as a whole. Why then, do scholars not make their articles available through open access? In particular, why are institutional repositories so poorly populated? (See, for instance, Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University’s Installation of DSpace.) The question is not idle; as Harvard University contemplates setting up an institutional repository, it behooves us to make sure that the effort is worthwhile and that a significant fraction of the scholarly article output of the faculty end up available therein. I will review the background on the issue and then make a proposal that I believe could lead to extremely high availability rates at modest cost. The proposal does, however, require the enthusiastic participation of the free culture movement.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/18/2007 10:46:00 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.
