In the midst of a firestorm about its proposed new WorldCat records policy, OCLC has announced a partnership that would ultimately transfer an open access icon, the University of Michigan Library’s OAIster service, to OCLC. While some concern has already been expressed about how OCLC’s revenue generation and content control issues might affect OAIster’s future, I have absolute—almost vehement—assurances from Chip Nilges, vice president of business development at OCLC, and John Wilkin, associate university librarian at the University of Michigan, that OAIster will remain a permanently free, open access service. ... OCLC has also announced an arrangement to assist the new HathiTrust in developing comprehensive bibliographic metadata for the digitized documents of member libraries. ...
Free and open access to the OAIster data will continue permanently. Nilges states, "We are absolutely committed to free and public access. We will run parallel tracks through 2009, while integrating OAIster into WorldCat.org [OCLC’s free service]." Wilkin confirmed that commitment. In fact, the issue of maintaining free open access is included in a clause in OCLC’s contract with the University of Michigan. ...
Under the new agreement with OCLC, the millions of books and archived documents hosted in a single repository by HathiTrust and made available for reading online will become more visible and accessible with the creation of WorldCat records for content. OCLC will also link to the collections in its Open Web WorldCat.org service as well as its WorldCat Local service. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 2/09/2009 10:30:00 AM.
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.
