Margaret Landesman, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Wants Libraries to do WHAT?Charleston Advisor, January 2005. On the fund-raising drive for the first-rate, open-access Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Excerpt: 'SEP's funding sources do not wish to become publishers. They fund start-ups....An established title of [SEP's] reputation has obvious appeal to publishers, reasonably priced and otherwise. This is where libraries absolutely have to get it right. We need to do whatever it takes to get SEP and other promising fledglings aloft and pointed in the direction of reasonably-priced nests....The partnership which has evolved to help SEP is a novel one. ICOLC (the International Coalition of Library Consortia), SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Research Coalition), Stanford University and Solinet have jointly made a plan to build a protected endowment (with guarantees and oversight) to permanently support an Open Access SEP. The idea (distinctly novel) is that every school in the world which has a philosophy department should put in money. In the U.S., the requested amount is $5,000 a year for 3 years for PhD institutions, $2,000 a year for MA ones, and $1,000 for BA institutions. This would raise $3 million. Stanford would raise another $1.25 million. That would do it....This is an idea which validates our ideals of both scholarship and librarianship in bringing to everyone, whether or not they can afford to pay, a high quality tool of permanent value....And if it gives us experience in developing possible models which will work in other situations that is a plus too. We need to invest in some risky new models. How else will we figure out which new models will fail and which will lead to long-term success?'
Finally, in the same issue, see Heather Morrison's favorable review of SEP.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/13/2005 10:25:00 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.
