JISC has just released a draft report, Requirements and Feasibility Study on Preservation of E-Prints. Excerpt: "Perhaps unusually in the rapidly evolving scholarly digital world, there is an opportunity to address the preservation of UK e-print collections before the issue becomes urgent. At the present time UK e-print repositories have yet to encounter significant preservation problems, and they hold only a very small proportion of academic research output. However, although the future is uncertain, e-print repositories are more and more likely to become home to significant material that is difficult to obtain elsewhere, material that is simply not held elsewhere. E-Prints can represent the corporate memory of research communities – hypothesis, experiment, critique and synthesis. It is difficult to see how this material can be viewed as anything but worthy of long-term preservation. Efforts to preserve this material should begin now." Send any comments by June 30 to James Hamish.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/29/2003 02:11:00 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.
