A foundering project to promote free digital archives of scholarship is getting new life, as a nonprofit foundation will pump in more dollars and technical expertise.
The DSpace Foundation, drawing on $500,000 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hewlett-Packard, will help hundreds of colleges, museums, and other nonprofit groups using DSpace, a program that helps institutions establish archives of research papers, data sets, images, and journal articles that the public can access freely. The foundation will offer technical advice to developers who are refining the software and help them integrate it with other applications. The foundation also will promote a wider distribution of the archives. The formation of the foundation is scheduled to be announced today.
MIT's libraries and HP said they had developed DSpace to promote collaboration among researchers, spark new ideas for study, and make scholars' intellectual output freely available to all.
Michele Kimpton, the foundation's executive director, said that at least 230 institutions, half of which are in the United States or Britain, are using the DSpace software. "The community was getting too large, and the amount of code and diversity of applications was getting too big to have no infrastructure behind it," she said….
The 13-member DSpace Federation Governance Advisory Board…believed that DSpace was hindered by a widely held view that it was "owned" by MIT and HP, and that a nonprofit governing group would -- in the long term -- help eliminate that perception and attract more financial contributions….
Ms. Kimpton, who was a director at the Internet Archive, said part of her role would be to raise money from corporations and other foundations for DSpace. She said she expected to hire a staff of three to five people.
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.
