In the January 2003 MIT Technology Review, Sally Atwood reviews DSpace. Quoting MacKenzie Smith, DSpace project manager: "If you look at the landscape of digital repositories, there seem to be two types. One concerns library holdings that happen to be in digital format. The other is a preprint archive that is tailored to scholarly papers in a discipline and is a vehicle for getting them out quickly. They are not concerned with long-term preservation.” (PS: Typically, the second sort of archive contains both preprints and postprints and is vitally concerned with long-term preservation.)
Atwood: "Even in this era of digital media, the vast majority of scholarly material at most universities goes unshared. But once DSpace is up and running, it will serve as a portal not only to MIT research, but also to research at partnering institutions. To test this possibility, MIT has entered into a federation with five other research institutions—Columbia University, Ohio State University, and the universities of Washington, Toronto, and Rochester—which will become the early adopters from outside the Institute. More than 30 other institutions have lined up to install DSpace on their campuses once the system proves itself. The implications for such collaborations are mind-boggling. Researchers who want to stay current with their colleagues’ work will no longer have to wait for conferences or journal publications. Discussions of new ideas can flow unimpeded." (PS: Yes, but it is open access that produces these mind-boggling advantages. DSpace is one of many infrastructures for open access.)
DSpace project members, SPARC, and other open-access advocates "hope that changes will come to the traditional publishing system as digital archives proliferate. 'We don’t think of repositories replacing journals,' says Rick Johnson, enterprise director of [SPARC]. 'In the near term, they are complements.' But there is no doubt they would compete as well. Copyright agreements offered by journals will have to change, allowing faculty to retain the right to archive their papers in institutional repositories." (Thanks to LIS News.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/04/2002 12:41:00 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.
