On 12 Jun 2007, at 18:02, Millington Peter wrote:
The policies in the OpenDOAR Policies Tool were derived mainly from
an extensive survey of around 300 repositories that was undertaken
at the beginning of 2006. The options therefore generally reflect
the actual permissions, restrictions and practices of real
repository administrators. Some are sites VERY open with their
material (e.g. Lincoln's "You may do as you wish with any metadata
harvested from this site") to highly propriatorial (e.g. ULP
Strasbourg's "Text, data and images should not be downloaded, nor
redistributed nor published anywhere else").
It is up to users of the Policies Tool as to how open or
restrictive they are. Administrators can, and perhaps should bypass
the restrictive options. Les's example is a case in point. (A few
repositories had shot themselves in the foot by prohibiting all
harvesting, thus disallowing Google and other search engines from
indexing their content. We therefore added the riders - adapted
from Caltech's policies - to improve matters.)
I think that this shows that the instincts of newly-hatched repository
managers are not necessarily in tune with innovations of the Internet and
the Web from ten years ago, let alone the "new public good" of Open
Access. Projects like OpenDOAR, which have the double advantage of vision
and technical wizardry, have an opportunity to lead the community into
better practice, rather than being led by the community into old habits.
--
Les carr
Received on Tue Jun 12 2007 - 21:32:17 BST