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. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 9/14/2008 03:35:00 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.