Siân Harris, Industry Prepares for the Future, ResearchInformation, January/February, 2005. Notes from the meeting, Online Information 2004. Excerpt: '[T]he trend towards free, online access could add a complication to the archiving issue. Many publishers are starting to permit material to be displayed on personal websites or submitted to institutional repositories and funding body archives. While strongly encouraged by government enquiries and industry regulators, this trend could lead to confusion. The terms under which material can be self-archived differ from publisher to publisher, so material available can range from raw research results, through preprints, to the final versions that have passed the peer review and editing processes of a journal. The publisher arrangements also restrict how soon these repository versions can be accessed after the official publication date. Thus, there could be several different versions of the same article available at different times, with little way for a search tool to compare their validity. There is also no guarantee of completeness in this process. With self-archiving, the onus is on individual researchers to submit their material to their websites or repositories, but there is often no obvious incentive for them to do so. According to the chief executive of The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), Sally Morris, about 90 per cent of publishers permit self-archiving but very few authors do it. 'There is not very much content in institutional repositories yet, and a lot of what does go in is not journal articles at all,' she said. There is also considerable uncertainty about the success of the full open-access model, where everything is free to view and authors [PS: or their employers or funding agencies] pay to publish their work.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/13/2005 12:40:00 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.
