Pertinent Prior Amsci Topic Threads:
"OA Content Provision vs. OA Content Preservation" (began: Oct 2004)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4023.html
"What exactly is the digital preservation problem?" (began: Jan 2002)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1780.html
"The 'Library of Alexandria; Non-Problem" (began: Oct 1999)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0413.html
The posting below concerns the general digital preservation problem
and its costs and business models. That is not the subject matter
of the American Scientist Open Access Forum, which is about open
access (and, at most, about long-term access to an institution's own
self-archived output), *not* about digital preservation in general,
or digital preservation of the official contents of journals in
particular, nor its costs or the business models for covering those
costs. Please redirect discussion of digital preservation in general
(as opposed to what is specific to open-access content provision
and preservation in particular) to the Digital Preservation list:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/archives/digital-preservation.html
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 14:45:38 +0200
From: "Barry Mahon" <barry.mahon_at_iol.ie>
To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_listserver.sigmaxi.org>
Subject: Re: RCUK policy on open access
On Wed, 29 Jun 2005 13:22:58 +0200, Steve Hitchcock wrote:
> On the point about preservation costs, these need not be a barrier to
> launching IRs. Business models for IRs have to be developed, but a broadly
> comparable model of preservation services has been adopted by publishers
> for journal articles, vesting preservation with specialists with no initial
> service costs to the publishers. To take an example, the arrangement
> between the KB (Koninklijke Bibliotheek - National library of the
> Netherlands) and a number of large international publishers for
> preservation services for digital copies of journals is that there are no
> up front costs to the publisher from the KB (see e.g.
> https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/1174.html).
I was tempted to respond to an earlier part of this discussion (on
asking RCUK to make grants for IAs) but didn't. However, if we are
entering the realm of 'business models' then maybe we should not be
considering grant based start-up, unless there is a long term model in
place. Preservation brings us smack bang into the longer term....is the
KB arrangement 'business' based? I know that other National Agencies
have reservations about the implications of long-term preservation -
not as a principle of course, but as a financial commitment, which they
have not yet discussed with their funders.
Barry Mahon, Executive Director, ICSTI, The International Council for
Scientific and Technical Information.
Received on Wed Jun 29 2005 - 17:36:54 BST