Kurt Paulus, Conference feature: Institutional repositories and their impact on publishing, JISC, July 5, 2004. A report on last month's PALS conference, Institutional Repositories and Their Impact on Scholarly Publishing (London, June 24, 2004). Excerpt: "Most of the repositories are small, with the number of records in the hundreds only....These figures suggest that one of the main early issues is to persuade academics to deposit their outputs in the repositories, through advocacy and training. One or two institutions take a somewhat more coercive line, but none of the speakers recommended this as a sensible route. With the current slow rate of progress, there is little evidence yet that repositories are focusing on reforming scholarly publishing....In principle, well based and stocked institutional repositories could have a significant impact on scholarly publishing, but Mark Ware's survey of publishers suggested that they are not yet quaking in their boots. Less than half those surveyed thought repositories would impact significantly on traditional publishing within five years. Nearly three quarters considered that the commercial impact would be zero or neutral. Their permissions policies reflect this fairly relaxed view and they are split between waiting, and doing some experimentation to explore the many publishing issues surrounding repositories."
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.
