...To support the work of [its] Strategic Planning Task Force, ARL senior staff have initiated an environmental scanning exercise to identify trends that are likely to affect research libraries and the work of the Association. The report considers not only challenges, but also opportunities....
Common Themes ...
Content industries inevitably seek to extend control over the copyright regime and over content, in general, while libraries, authors, and research institutions endeavor to provide more access to and active management of the intellectual assets produced by the academy....
The impetus to bring dissemination back under the auspices and control of the academy is strengthening but scholars face some conflicting incentives.
Preferences for maximizing access and dissemination continue to strengthen among both researchers and research institutions.
Momentum is growing at the campus and national levels to create new norms for author rights management where authors maintain a greater share of rights to allow use of their work and to grant limited rights to their home institution to assume dissemination responsibilities.
Strategies, such as institutional policies and institution/publisher contracts, will be adopted to ensure that institutions can disseminate work.
A growing imbalance between the numbers of aspiring faculty and tenure positions could lead to rising standards for numbers of publications generally and for publishing in what are perceived as the most prestigious outlets.
Requirements for accountability may increase the emphasis on publishing venues with long track records of success as determined using long-standing quantitative measures of performance, e.g., Journal Impact Factor.
New quantitative measures of impact may emerge that draw on projects like Google Books to expose the citation content in book literature.
Yet, research institutions are building a variety of dissemination services, often in conjunction with the development of related cyberinfrastructure.
New kinds of valuable content are proliferating, providing the opportunity for research institutions to develop different strategies and norms for dissemination that retain the right to make decisions about present and future access and use within the research community....
Continued advances in technology will enhance search and access. The combination of focus on technology, innovation, and a renewed emphasis on science and technology issues may bring into even greater focus the benefits of public access policies....This may
lead to new government services/initiatives/policies such as the NIH Public Access Policy particularly as access to federally funded resources is seen as advancing innovation and addressing pressing national and international issues;
lead to new policies promoting open data;
exacerbate tensions with the private sector concerning the appropriate government role (traditional content) and potentially concerning how the government collaborates with some industries to promote government initiatives (search); and
spur greater use of large scale data text and data mining tools by government that will increase the tension with some private sector publishers/content producers while at the same time lead to new collaborative relationships between the government and other sectors....
[The decline of the Canadian dollar relative to the US dollar will reduce Canadian acquisitions.] On the other hand, the economic situation could be favourable to the further development of open access publishing in Canada....
Open Access publication mandates may well be adopted by the funding councils, of which one, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, has a mandate now. Data preservation will also likely be more widely mandated. Systematic enforcement of the mandates will depend on the development of appropriate repositories, whether disciplinary or institutional. A Canadian PubMed Central is currently in development to which CIHR-funded research reports or articles will have to be contributed.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/09/2009 10:19:00 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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
