Whether it’s e-research in Australia, cyberinfrastructure in the USA, the grid in Europe, or e-science in the UK, a transformation is occurring in research practice, a transformation that will have a profound impact on the roles of researchers and information professionals working in higher education....Arguably technology is the easy part; harder is the human dimension. The matter of connecting people (researchers) to resources is not only an international issue but also a national, regional, and local issue. Linking people to resources – researchers to scholarly materials – has been the role of the librarian for centuries. Libraries have traditionally been central to the research endeavour, managing and preserving resources increasingly in digital form and making these resources accessible to the researcher, often through collaboration and partnerships with other libraries. Hence, libraries have know-how not only in managing, making accessible and preserving scholarly resources but also in forming federations and collaborations to share published scholarly work. But the nature of scholarly communication is changing, with researchers wanting access to primary research data, often in digital form. No longer is scholarly communication a final discrete publication that is to be managed, made accessible, and preserved. Libraries may even risk fading from existence if they don’t respond effectively to the changing environment. In e-research, it is the primary research data that must often be managed, made accessible, and curated....But who will take responsibility for the longer-term curation of and access to this data?
PS: This article first appeared in Educause Review for November/December 2005.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/24/2006 09:55:00 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.
