Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Sunday, September 14, 2008

How (not) to support IRs

Dorothea Salo, Contrast, Caveat Lector, September 11, 2008.

I’m pretty open in my belief that Europe in general and the UK in particular are a goodly distance ahead of the US in taking repositories (and repository-rats) seriously and moving them forward. Two things that came across the transom today confirmed that impression.

The first was the JISC-sponsored Rights and Repositories workshop. I want to go to something like this. I’ve always had to deal with rights issues (beyond the ordinary rote stuff) ad-hoc and mostly unsupported. With ad-hoc problems, that mostly works, but I feel as though I’m tiptoeing through minefields. Just the validation would be nice! Note also that half the morning speakers are real repository-rats dealing with real problems in real repositories, and that the entire afternoon was repository-rats talking amongst themselves rather than Talking Heads (or worse, Big Thinkers) talking at them.

The second thing was the announcement of the SPARC IR meeting program. I will be going to this, because I can’t very well not, but I must confess I haven’t been entirely enthusiastic about it… and I’m still not. Except for “oh, hey, they got a speaker from DRIVER!” DRIVER, of course, is a European initiative. ...