Some of these institutions are using IR software as a quick-and-dirty digital preservation mechanism, mostly for institutional records. These institutions don’t have any particular commitment to open access, nor are they under any illusions about their faculty’s commitment thereto. They’ll let faculty deposit if they’ve a mind, but that’s not what the IR is there for. A variant on this scenario is IR software considered alongside other content- or knowledge-management systems. ...
Unfortunately, that’s not the whole story. At least some of these small institutions have The Shiny in their sights. Everybody has an IR these days, so why don’t we? If we build it, they will come! ...
To be fair, small institutions have one major advantage large ones don’t: scale. Yes, scale. Small is beautiful; at many small schools, it’s perfectly feasible for the library to have one-on-one relationships with nearly every researcher on campus ...
There tend to be cultural differences between small teaching-focused and large research-focused institutions as well, ones that do not bode well for open access. One is obvious: these places tend not to have physicists, medical researchers, computer scientists—precisely the disciplines that are early adopters of open access. What they have in plenty are humanists and social scientists, who see OA (when they see it at all, which most frankly don’t) as a commie plot aimed directly at the heart of their beloved scholarly societies. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 11/06/2008 09:49:00 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.
