Alma Swan, Paul Needham, Steve Probets, Adrienne Muir, Ann O'Brien, Charles Oppenheim, Rachel Hardy, and Fytton Rowland, Delivery, Management and Access Model for E-prints and Open Access Journals within Further and Higher Education, EPIC and Key Perspectives (undated but released c. October 4). Excerpt: "This study describes a delivery, management and access model for e-prints and open access journal content for UK Further and Higher Education commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)....[T]he archives that are being created are not being filled with e-prints quickly enough to provide open access to the bulk of UK scholarly literature. There are political and cultural influences responsible for this slow progress, including inertia on the part of authors, most of whom are still not yet voluntarily self-archiving their work. There are ways in which this inertia may be overcome, including mandating the self-archiving of e-prints of published articles by authors in institutional e-print archives. The recent report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology recommended (in Recommendation 44) mandatory depositing of eprints in institutional repositories. This mandate could be implemented by the institutions themselves or by research-funders....The study therefore recommends the 'harvesting' model...constituting a UK national service founded upon creating an interoperable network of OAI-compliant, distributed, institution-based e-print archives. Such a service, based on harvesting metadata (and, later, full-text) from distributed, institution-based e-print archives and open access journals would be cheaper to implement and would more effectively garner the nation’s scholarly research output."
Update. JISC, the report funder, has issued a press release on its conclusions (October 5, 2004). Excerpt: "Setting up and providing a centralised UK service for depositing and redistributing e-prints would be costly. It would also omit content submitted to 'distributed institutional, subject-based, and open-access journal archives.'...[The report] sets out a rationale for any new work undertaken by JISC in the area, with detail and emphasis on three specific themes: technical issues, preservation of research and political and cultural factors that need to be considered. The report also suggests recommendations for those who wish to self-archive, what steps could be made for research led institutions to establish e-print archives and how data providers, service providers and software developers need to work together to develop compatible metadata."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/04/2004 10:45:00 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.
