Porter, George (2006) Let's Get it Started!Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship 47.
"...Stevan Harnad is into the second decade of his jeremiad on the subject of self-archiving. A number of platforms have been created to support institutional repositories [IRs]... If librarians and academicians agree on the desirability of institutional repositories, and software platforms and services are available to make repositories technically feasible, one is left to ponder a few questions. Why are there so few institutional repositories up and running? Why are the existing institutional repositories generally not well filled with the intellectual output of their respective institutions?..."
< jeremiad > Yes, jeremiads for self-archiving are not enough. Yes, creating IR software is not enough. Yes, creating IRs is not enough. Yes, library activism is not enough. (See Book of Ezekiel.) Not even providing the evidence on how self-archiving enhances research impact is enough: Only (institutional and funder) self-archiving mandates are (necessary and) sufficient to set self-archiving inexorably on the path to 100% OA (yet that's precisely what George Porter fails even to mention!). (See Book of Ruth.) Nor are jeremiads to mandate self-archiving enough to generate self-archiving mandates either: Only the empirical example of those institutions and funders that already mandate self-archiving -- and have thus demonstrated the success of mandated self-archiving -- will generate self-archiving mandates. And self-archiving. And 100% OA. Amen. < /jeremiad >
Update. Stevan's comment has now been published as a letter to the editor in the Fall 2006 issue of Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/20/2006 09:13:00 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.
