On 7 Oct 2004, at 12:38, Brian Simboli wrote:
> But: why not cut to the chase? Why stumble over some pocket change en
> route to picking up the one thousand dollar bill that lies ahead on the
> sidewalk? Why not directly engage in infrastructural initiatives that
> will concurrently resolve access, affordability, preservation, and any
> number of other interwoven issues?
If you haven't got enough money for a cup of coffee, pick up the change
- if you haven't got enough access (or impact) start self-archiving
now!!!
I see this issue (and the recent discussions on this forum) as actually
being a manifestation of the Research vs Development argument. There
are some things that we know how to do, and we should do now to improve
our world. There are other things that we don't quite know how to do
yet, and we should research into those things. We should get funding to
put the former into practice and funding to find out how the latter
could be put into practice. (We might get these monies from different
funding bodies with different agendas.)
Self archiving is easy. We know how to do it. We have developed more
than enough interoperable software platforms to make a really big
impact on the literature and the way we can use it. We should be paid
to install these systems and start using them!
Preservation is difficult. No-one knows how to solve all its problems.
We should be paid to examine how this could be achieved, and think
about the various roles of the creators and funders and managers of
digital resources and speculate about their future relationship to
intellectual property.
But it must be a fundamental tenet of R&D that no practical, useful
service should ever be harnessed to or held hostage by speculative,
research code - not until the issues are well understood and it ceases
to be a matter of research and intellectual enquiry. We should do the
research, we should ask the questions, we MUST find the answers, but we
should not delay or degrade our useful developments with our unfinished
research.
---
Les Carr
University of Southampton
Received on Thu Oct 07 2004 - 14:03:48 BST