MacKenzie Smith, associate director for Technology at MIT Libraries, hails DSpace as an effort to reverse the trend of researchers losing their hold on physical research data, a growing problem in government and academia alike. “Our faculty members are keeping their research under their desks, on lots of disks, and praying that nothing happens to it,” she says, noting that earlier this decade, some MIT researchers actually may have misplaced some of their early studies and communications that led to the creation of the Internet itself. “We have a long way to go,” she admits....Down the line, Smith predicts that the biggest challenge to the DSpace effort will be a legal one: convincing (and subsequently reminding) faculty to retain their rights to archive material when the rights are up, so that schools don’t have to shell out additional money to utilize work that quite rightfully should be theirs to access free of charge. Understandably, researchers who publish seek the best deals to publish their work, and these deals frequently require them to fork over rights to a publisher. But change could be imminent: The National Institutes of Health have changed their public access guidelines to include free electronic access to articles that come out of research funds. Smith says that if researchers followed this lead and changed the terms of their copyright agreements to allow for a copy in DSpace, the system could grow exponentially. “We understand that if we can’t capture content, we won’t have anything to preserve and we’ll lose the scholarly record,” she says. “The next step for us is to come up with language [that] researchers can use when they go to publishers and say, ‘This is what we need to protect our work for the future.’”
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/03/2005 10:01:00 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.
