Open Access News

In an era when the ability to read a document, watch a video, or run a simulation could depend on having a particular version of a program installed on a specific computer platform, the usable life span of a piece of digital content can be less than 10 years. That's a recipe for disaster when you consider how much we rely on stored information to maintain our scholarly, legal, and cultural record and to help us with, and profit from, our digital labor. Indeed, the ephemeral nature of both data formats and storage media threatens our very ability to maintain scientific, legal, and cultural continuity, not on the scale of centuries, but considering the unrelenting pace of technological change, from one decade to the next. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, in Cambridge, where I am associate director for technology, we are attacking the problem of maintaining and sharing digital content over the long haul with a project called DSpace, which we embarked on with Hewlett-Packard Co., in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2000. For this digital repository we have built a simple, open-source software application that not only accepts digital materials and makes them available on the Web but also puts them into a data-management regime that helps to preserve them for generations to come....DSpace is storing and preserving materials just like these at MIT and 100 other organizations worldwide. Among them are Cornell University; the University of Toronto; the University of Cambridge, in England; the Australian National University; and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Like Linux and other open-source software projects, DSpace has a growing group of committed programmers distributed across the globe who continually maintain and improve it....Finally, [after DSpace asks for metadata and checks the file format] the researcher clicks through a license that grants DSpace the right to store, preserve, and redistribute the article, and if she retained the copyright to the article, asks whether she wants to assign a Creative Commons License to it. This license gives other researchers the right, among other things, to include the article as part of their course readings or quote it in their own scholarly writings, without asking for her explicit permission.