James A. Jacobs, James R. Jacobs, and Shinjoung Yeo, Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program, a preprint forthcoming from the Journal of Academic Librarianship, May 2005. Excerpt: 'GPO's recently released strategic plan lists three "essential missions." Two of these missions conflict with each other. The mission of providing "free and ready public access" to electronic documents conflicts with the mission of distributing electronic documents "on a cost recovery basis."...In order to charge for digital information, it is necessary to reduce functionality of or limit access to that information until payment is made....To use such tools to provide a technical solution to GPO's conflicting missions could greatly diminish free public access to public information....The easiest way to ensure that information is freely available for all is to distribute government information to FDLP libraries. FDLP libraries are required by statute to make such information freely available to the public. Anything short of this (e.g., creating non-legislated partners without this mandate, relying on private sector partners) endangers the free access of information by removing the information from the legislatively required free-access system of the FDLP....There is no inconsistency between, on the one hand, the government and libraries providing fully functional digital government information for free to the public and, on the other hand, the private sector adding value to that government information and creating new information products....The library community, the FDLP libraries specifically, and all citizens must realize that we cannot accept promises from GPO that it will be able to find a technical and economic solution. GPO must state specifically how it will do so and how it will guarantee the policy of free citizen-access to public information that is fully functional – not crippled with access restrictions....Democracy depends on citizens being able to easily find and freely use information about their government.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/04/2005 08:20:00 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.
