RE: a preservation experience

[Jan Velterop <jan@biomedcentral.com>]

Responses interweaved. Jan Velterop, BioMed Central

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Anthony Watkinson [mailto:anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com]
> Sent: 30 October 2003 22:50
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: Re: a preservation experience
> 
> I wondered when Jan would post his piece of publisher publicity. All
> national libraries who are either committed to or will be committed to
> archiving the national electronic published output will commit to
> migrating to achieve long term access. There is no point in 
> their activity otherwise. 

Sure. But why should very few seem to be willing to make that commitment
public?

> Publishers (it can be assumed) will preserve in the short term,
> while the content has commercial value.

Which open access content, by definition, has not. The value is in the
service of publishing it; not in rights and access mongering.

> In many countries the deposit of national electronic content will be a
> legal requirement. For example an act has just been passed in the UK.  
> For some reason the Dutch national library (which runs a voluntary 
> system) has decided that it is appropriate for them to spend the 
> money of their taxpayers on archiving BMC content long term. I cannot 
> guess what the reason is unless the company is registered in the Dutch 
> Antilles. They archive Elsevier and Kluwer also but they are local.

How many papers that Elsevier and Kluwer publish are of Dutch origin? Has
it not dawned on Anthony that science is a global pursuit? Could it not
just be that the Royal Dutch Library (KB) and the Dutch government take
the view that their taxpayers' money is well spent making contributions to
the global knowledge sphere, or 'noospere' as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
called it? The logical extension of Anthony's thinking would be to share
scientific results obtained with a particular country's taxpayers' money
only with those taxpayers. Have any other non-NL-registered publishers
ever approached the KB with a view to preserving their content? My guess
is that the KB is positioning itself to be one of the pre-eminent
repositories of science literature in Europe, perhaps the world. Starting
with more than a quarter of the literature (Elsevier + Kluwer) is a
logical step in that regard.

We would be happy for the BL (or any other library) to preserve the BioMed
Central content as soon as they are ready for it. We have offered it to
the BL long before the KB was even on our radarscreen, but we can't force
it upon them.

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