Heather Morrison, The CERN Library Team: an OA Inspiration!OA Librarian, April 9, 2006. The latest installment of Heather's celebration of librarians who work for OA. Excerpt:
CERN - the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and birthplace of the World Wide Web, and the CERN Library Team - currently led by Jens Vigen, has been a leader in the open dissemination of scientific results since its inception decades ago. CERN’s free distribution of preprints in paper format has evolved with the technologies available, from FTP to World Wide Web distribution, to the current OAI-compliant CERN Document Server (CDS). If any discipline could afford to rest on its OA laurels, you would think it would be physics! The CERN Library Team, however, is not resting on its laurels at all, but continues to lead the way, from OA via self-archiving to a current push towards full OA publishing (and self-archiving, too).
Accomplishments of the CERN library team include: [1] The CDS - CERN Document Server repository - as of April 9, 2006, CDS contains over 800,000 bibliographic records, including 360,000 fulltext documents, of interest to people working in particle physics and related areas. A whole team of hard working people have concentrated on this, filling it, harvesting, programming, scanning, managing, etc. [2] Organising (along with LIBER, SPARC, SPARC Europe, OSI and the OAI) - and hosting the OAI Workshops, one of the world’s major gathering-points for the open access archiving community....[3] High Energy Physics (HEP) Libraries Webzine (an OA publication)....
CERN is now on at the least the third OA policy revision, which addresses OA journals. In 2005, the focus at CERN library was changing publication model meetings. That is, CERN - and its library - are leading the way once more in physics, to move from OA via self-archiving to full OA via OA publishing (and self-archiving too)....There are some details about CERN Library's OA history in the presentation, CERN Document Server Software: The Integrated Digital Library. For the latest on CERN library’s OA leadership, have a look at the SPARC Open Access Forum Archives - look for the thread, CERN’s Historic Role in OA. CERN’s Joanne Yeomans, for example, talks about current developments, including a basket (for creating one’s own bibliographies) and rating system....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/10/2006 12:52:00 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.
