Dorothea Salo, Sustainability, The Book of Trogool, August 6, 2009.
... I learned from a colleague that arXiv is looking for a new funding model, as Cornell is wearying of picking up the entire tab. Various options are on the table, and I'm not competent to opine on their feasibility. I'm more interested in the larger question: how are we, we libraries and we researchers, organizing to shoulder the burden of electronic archives, especially open-access ones?
Historically, the answer has been "not effectively." I can name scads of dead digital projects without having to think hard, and I daresay you can too. This is no longer an acceptable answer, if indeed it ever was. I'm just a little bemused and worried about the models that seem to be emerging—again, especially for open-access archives. If Cornell can't underwrite arXiv, arguably the most successful preprint archive ever, what does that mean for disciplinary repositories generally? (See also the move of OAIster from the University of Michigan to OCLC.) What does it mean for library support of open access, to data as well as documents?
There's more in those questions than I can unpack in a single post, so suffice it to say I think librarianship's stance on this question is a bellwether. Are we tethered to the past or working for the future? Are we really memory organizations, or are we only memory organizations for print? Will we pay for human access to knowledge, or only institutional access? ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 8/10/2009 09:02:00 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.
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.
