On 5-Oct-04, at 1:53 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> What has to be resisted is librarians' instinct to go all and only for
> gold (OA Publishing), even though 100% gold would of course solve 100%
> of their serials crisis! Yes, the golden road of OA Publishing is to
> be encouraged and supported, but it is an extremely slow, indirect and
> uncertain road to 100% OA, whereas the green road of OA self-archiving
> is a fast, direct and certain one, already fully within immediate reach.
The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) is very actively
engaged in setting up institutional repositories at all of Canada'a
research universities. For more information:
http://www.carl-abrc.ca/frames_index.htm
Some institutional repositories are in operational mode, while others
are in planning mode. Librarians are, of course, very much encouraging
faculty to support the development and filling of these institutional
archives.
To me, as a librarian, it makes perfect sense to fully support both the
green and the gold roads. We need the green road - right now - in
order to provide maximum access to current (and past) publications by
our faculty. As we look into the future, publishing methods that take
into account the need for open accessibility just make sense. For that
matter, in order to facilitate preservation, my personal belief is that
we need self-archived copies in our institutional repositories, even
for articles that are published as open access in the first place.
Given the ease of copying electronic information, this is not as costly
as one might at first glance assume.
cheers,
Heather G. Morrison
Project Coordinator
BC Electronic Library Network
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Phone: 604-268-7001
Fax: 604-291-3023
Email: heatherm_at_eln.bc.ca
Web:
http://www.eln.bc.ca
Received on Tue Oct 05 2004 - 23:37:40 BST