More than A decade ago, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) launched a series of studies on the history of large-scale, technology-intensive infrastructures in the United States with the explicit goal of informing the development of a national information infrastructure. Infrastructure was understood as a system with at least four properties: it is widely accessible, it is shared and ubiquitous, and it confers economic advantage....
[T]he notion of sharability implies the existence of multiple stakeholders who trust a shared system, even though their individual interests may be neither uniform nor congruent....Thus, the key characteristic of infrastructure is overall coherence, not uniformity at every level.
We can think, then, of cyberinfrastructure as a shared layer that supports multiple disciplines, activities, and scholars and that offers a platform for new kinds of scholarship and inquiry. That shared layer encompasses the organizational framework in which standards and codes of practice are developed and made available to users, enabling the shared layer to become widely accessible and hence ubiquitous....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/13/2007 01:42:00 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.
