A Canadian organization is building an archive infrastructure to allow researchers and educators in developing countries a better chance of sharing their work with the world. The International Development Research Centre, a Canadian Crown corporation, is following the model established by MIT and Canadian universities like U of [Toronto] by setting up an open source database of articles.
In the case of those universities, the database is designed to hold content written by local faculty and scholars. The IRDC’s Open Archive project will provide a venue for researchers who may, in the past, have found it difficult to get their work published. These researchers live in what the IRDC deems “southern countries,” mostly in Africa, South America and parts of Asia. “Southern researchers are pretty much cut off from northern scholarly channels, so the whole idea is to break down all those mainly geographic, social and economic barriers to getting your work out there,” said Marjorie Whalen, director of research information management service for Ottawa-based IRDC....IRDC is looking at two alternatives for the Open Archive, both open source: DSpace, developed by HP and MIT, and Eprint, developed by the University of Southampton in the U.K. These two applications have emerged as the front runners for numerous scholarly archiving projects....The biggest challenges around institutional archives aren’t technical but cultural, said Kathleen Shearer, a research associate with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, whose members include more than two dozen universities. “It’s quite a new role for libraries, because libraries are usually bringing in new content for researchers rather than collecting content that’s created at the institution,” said Shearer. “The biggest challenge with these types of projects is actually getting the researchers to deposit their content.”...Some university scholars may be concerned with the copyright issues around open publishing, said Devakos, but most journals already contain a clause that allows for content to be published online in an archival context. Generating international submissions for the IDRC’s Open Archive won’t be a problem, said Whelan. There is already a huge demand for this type of service in nations that lack publishing resources. Political restrictions are also becoming less a problem, she added. “For the most part, those barriers are coming down. The problems are not so much government monopolies and government barriers, but there are definitely problems with bandwidth. That’s sort of the last frontier,” she said.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/21/2006 02:19:00 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.
