"Rapidly changing" is the term most often used these days to describe the landscape of scholarly communication. Scholars have to clear new and higher hurdles as they bump up against copyright and fair-use issues, open-access mandates, and a baffling array of publication and dissemination models.
How much of his own published work can a scholar post on a personal Web site without raising his publisher's ire? How much of someone else's work can he use in his course pack without trampling on fair use and risking a fine or legal action? How does a researcher upload her work to her institution's repository, and are there consequences if she opts out? Those are just some of the questions that professors may find themselves tripping over.
Where can researchers find a guide to lead them through this 21st-century obstacle course?
The library, of course.
More institutions are creating or beefing up offices and programs in scholarly communication or hiring librarians with expertise in copyright and intellectual property....
[Harvard's Stuart Shieber] told The Chronicle that just about all of Harvard's dozen or so faculties are considering open-access policies. "Each school has its own characteristics, and the policies need to be responsive to the differences among the schools," he says. "The process has to be faculty-based and consensual. But the [Office of Scholarly Communication] can help by advising and serving as a source for information."
Ambitions don't stop there. Mr. Shieber expects the office to evolve as "a laboratory for expanding and evolving scholarly communication practices." Perhaps its most important objective focuses on something of concern to librarians and scholars alike: figuring out a system to support authors who want to publish in open-access journals "by underwriting reasonable publication charges for those journals." ...
Update. The article is now OA. (Thanks to the Chronicle.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/18/2008 02:35:00 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.
