Today JISC announced a £4m funding program for institutional repositories throughout the UK. From the press release, Sharing knowledge, widening access: 'A repository is a digital store of principally research outputs and journal articles, but also potentially a wealth of other information, created by teachers, academics and researchers and made openly available to all who wish to access them. Their great advantage is that they enable the free sharing of information, encouraging collaboration and the widespread communication of UK education and research activity. In its 2004 report Scientific Publications: Free for All? the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology hailed the creation of institutional repositories as a means of making research articles more freely available. Furthermore, it specifically praised JISC’s work in exploring new models for accessing and sharing such resources. Building on these and other recent developments, the twenty-three projects within the Digital Repositories programme will explore the many cultural, technical and management aspects of creating and managing institutional and other repositories. Although the development of repositories has up to now focussed largely on making accessible the outputs of the research community, this new programme will develop the concept still further by encouraging the growth of repositories for learning materials, data and much else.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/16/2005 11:04:00 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.
