Re: US University OA Resolutions Omit Most Important Component

From: David Stern <david.e.stern_at_yale.edu>
Date: Wed, 4 May 2005 23:02:05 EDT

While Stevan's push for 100% coverage of academic materials within OA
repositories is on target, I still believe that we need a more reliable
and universal infrastructure for decentralized repositories ... one that
includes long-term support, which means funding for all authors and
organized R&D for enhanced navigation.

The present loose federation of existing D-Space (and other) and possible
FEDORA-based institutional repository (IR) platforms does not yet offer
the scalable design that we require in order to develop integrated tools
with universal storage. Perhaps we need to devlop a blend of IRs and
discipline-based repositories (a la arXiv) in order to provide platforms
and navigation for all users -- not just those in organizations able to
run their own IRs?
 
We have the technology, now we need to focus our support on a plan that
provides universal storage and access ... with or without the peer review
overlay for the present time.

David

David Stern
Director of Science Libraries and Information Services
Kline Science Library
New Haven, CT 06520-8111
email: david.e.stern_at_yale.edu


Quoting Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>:

> University Open Access (OA) Resolutions, even toothless, purely abstract
> ones with no concrete policy proposals, are better than no University OA
> Resolutions, one would have thought, just as some sort of NIH OA Policy
> is better than none (one would have thought).

[SNIP]

> The only thing universities need to do in order to make the content that
> they themselves already provide openly accessible is to keep on
> publishing it in journals exactly as they always have done, but in
> addition, to make an online copy of it openly accessible to all would-be
> users webwide who cannot afford the official published version -- by
> self-archiving a supplementary draft of every published article in the
> university's own OA eprint archive.

[SNIP]

> Let us hope that other universities (US and non-US) as well as research
> institutions and research funders world-wide will not copy/clone diffuse
> and directionless statements/resolutions such as Columbia's and
> Berkeley's but instead include the critical concrete component {1} that
> will convey us all at long last to the optimal and inevitable (and long
> overdue) outcome for research, researchers, their institutions, their
> funders, and their funders' funders, the tax-paying public: 100% OA
>
> Stevan Harnad
Received on Thu May 05 2005 - 04:02:05 BST