Dear Thomas Krichel, dear all,
Göttingen University Press has watched the developments of GAP carefully from
the beginning on without being involved in it for some reasons. We are member
in the follow-up GAP association however.
Some points I would like to make:
a) GAP Works is an IT-supported editorial process which is successfully
working in a couple of publishing projects. Please turn to Ebs Hilf from ISN
Oldenburg for more details.
b) the GAP Verein (follow-up of the project,
http://www.gap-portal.de/) is in
the process of profiling itself. It consists of several German Universities
and University libraries with activities on electronic publishing. The
association meeting has taken place 5 days ago, more information is therefore
about to come.
a) GAP as a project from my very personal point of view didn't manage to pull
in a "critical mass" of publishers neither during the project phase nor
afterwards and therefore didn't manage to profile itself as the service
provider they intended to be. For the same reason content always was a
crucial point in GAP which couldn't be solved sufficiently.
OAPEN however is carried out by experienced and successful publishers steered
by their universities with a lot of content either already out there as Open
Access versions or willing to do so.
Putting up a repository and offering it as a platform for grey literature,
pre/postprints and other parallel publications indeed can be done without
extra funding. The technique is there, standards like OAI-PMH, the IR
software and so on. Putting out books in an Open Access fashion -- especially
in the HSS where quality control and the prepress processes are rather time
consuming -- needs special consideration, certain care, scientific evaluation
(cost models, business models, IPR-aspects) and a decent technical platform.
None of the SME publishers involved (who have to make money with what they
do) are able to do this on the side or out of their own pockets.
The European Commission is consistent with this point of view and therefore
funds the project. Note however that the funding line of OAPEN is
eContentplus
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/econtentplus/index_en.htm.
Being funded in this action line requires that the end of the day there is a
significant amount of high-quality content in the web.
Best
Margo Bargheer
Göttingen University Press
Margo Bargheer
Raum 2.21, Neubau der SUB Göttingen
tel. +49 551 39-91188 | fax +49 551 39-2457
bargheer_at_sub.uni-goettingen.de
----------------------------
Elektronisches Publizieren | Electronic Publishing
http://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de/0_e-publishing.html.de
State and University Library Goettingen
----------------------------
Open Access
www.open-access.net
________________________________
Von: American Scientist Open Access Forum im Auftrag von Thomas Krichel
Gesendet: Mo 18.02.2008 04:49
An: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Betreff: Re: Books in Open access : OAPEN has been approved by EU
Jean-Claude Guédon writes
> It is hard to know if it differs from the GAP project when the URL
> Thomas gave us leads only to one page with an e-mail. Can you clarify,
> Thomas?
I am not a project insider, so I can't comment on the project's
(presumed) failure. Stefan Gradmann, or Eberhard Hilf probably can.
There is a paper about GAP at
http://elpub.scix.net/cgi-bin/works/Show?0323
The fact that the project is not alive three years after
the paper was done should be a useful lesson. I claim that
GAP is sufficiently close to OAPEN that OAPEN should
not claim to be the first project of this kind. If the
OAPEN proposers have not studied GAP in some detail,
they failed to do their homework.
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
phone: +7 383 330 6813 skype: thomaskrichel
Received on Mon Feb 18 2008 - 15:36:01 GMT