Joseph Janes, What I Learned This Week, American Libraries Online, April 2005. Excerpt: 'My favorite sentence [from a recent Clifford Lynch talk at the U of Washington]? "We are only now getting over the assumption that we write articles to be read by other people." If you want your writing to be widely found, it has to go through an increasing number of computational processes, including spidering, indexing, data mining, and machine translation; and new generations of such beasts are constantly under development....A great deal of the recent discussion around scholarly communication has focused on institutional repositories, which could be maintained by universities to provide access to the scholarly work of the faculty without going through the traditional journal-publishing model. It's possible that this could provide significant savings; Lynch lodged this in the larger context of attempts to open materials to wider audiences. This is a concern of museums with huge collections that can’t possibly all be put on display, state-supported colleges trying to demonstrate their value to taxpayers, and the growing movement to make government-supported research results available to the public that paid for them. He also suggested that a university-based repository might capture published output as well as more of the intellectual life of the campus, including symposia, performances, and even the work of student groups. Finally (and believe me, I'm leaving out a ton here), he tossed in an observation about Google Scholar. There has been a lot of hand-waving about this (and Google Print, and Google’s other announcements du jour); as usual, I got a new insight from Lynch. Google Scholar, he said, is the company's first approach into the invisible web and as such will raise the cost of entry for new potential web-search companies. No longer will a couple of guys in a garage with a great idea and a few servers be able to make an impression in the search world. The deep web will have to be involved, which means deals with content providers. All of a sudden the web-search world starts to look a lot more like the traditional content industry...."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/26/2005 09:24:00 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.
