DSpace and related projects are building web-based collections of 'open content' in the public domain. While land grant [colleges and universities] routinely post 'open content' for extension, the DSpace partners led by MIT have bet the farm. Should other land grants join DSpace? What are the global uses of open extension content?...[I]n the absence of other changes, most farmers will not be reached by the web in the short-term. There are many variables that impact farming that we cannot control; we can control the creation of information banks to help farmers deal with the variables. There is no global agricultural library in a strong sense, and there could be....On-line documents grew rapidly at many extension web sites in the 1990's, but these were often posted haphazardly, without meta-data and on different servers, or hidden from search engines in databases. Extension services are now taking steps to create digital libraries of their content. It is wise to consider needed document management strategies such as meta-data and archiving early in your efforts. Distributed digital libraries are a key goal for the coming decade, allowing farmers to transparently search for resources across multiple extension sites, and effectively creating a world-wide library of food, agricultural and natural resource information....Online agricultural outreach is exploding in land grant universities but with little coordination. For example, there is no master web index of available full text information to browse and no effective way to search online holdings....The problem...is the absence of an open content respository for farmers. For example, there still is no central index for browsing content from the land grants or a search function to discover it....We also have not yet seen the emergence of researcher communities in agriculture that build repositories of open content, as the physics community did....New initiatives of any kind are less likely and especially those that have significant start-up costs and no revenue model. MIT tells us that their project offers content " for the good of mankind. There is no revenue model." But revenue models are more and more important at land grants today. One can speculate that publicly funded colleges will follow MIT in the long run anyway. The land grants face an even greater impetus to do so since it is part of their mission to disseminate knowledge. Federal funding in the future could very well include mandates that publically funded content be posted and deposited into a national repository. Can the process be speeded up?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/01/2005 10:53:00 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.
