Dorothea Salo, Voice and Labor, Caveat Lector, March 26, 2008. Excerpt:
...[We repository managers are] not talking. We’re not organizing. (The OA publishers are, but we’re not.) Even those of us who are talking are talkinghardly morethanhappytalk. I don’t know how much more clear I can possibly make it: green open access as she is practiced (rather than merely opined about) has a severe morale problem. When I asked NISO to make me proud of what I do, I wasn’t kidding....
[R]epository labor is invisible. Just ten minutes or less per article,...the software is free and easy to set up and Just Runs, and that’s all there is to it! ...
Certain types of labor in this field are even more invisible than deposit labor. Systems administration (“it just runs!”) and design labor, certainly. Rights-clearance labor, which is picky, demanding work notable for its total lack of clarity....
Verily I say unto you: Harvard’s Provost’s office, library, and IT division had better be hard at work on citation-retrieval automation, automation that involves as little faculty labor as possible. And verily I say unto anyone who wants a mandate like Harvard’s that they’d better do likewise. And verily I say unto everyone that we (as a field) are so far from being adequately automated as to scare me....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/27/2008 03:13:00 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.
