Fulfilling the promise of scholarly communication

[heatherm@eln.bc.ca]

An interesting article!

David Prosser points to some useful data and analysis relevant to
scholarly communications and open access discussions.  One concept which
David brings up, which is important but I don't see being talked about as
much as it could be, is the shift in responsibility for archiving and
access that has taken place in the shift from print to electronic.  In the
print world, libraries very clearly had the responsibility for archiving;
often, publishers did not retain back issues. (I can recall looking into
back issues of newspapers and being surprised to find that the publisher
referred people to the library for anything older than a month).  In the
electronic world, initially at least, the responsibility for back issues
moved to the publishers.  Does this make sense in the long run, though?

Prosser, David C. (2005) Fulfilling the Promise of Scholarly Communication
- a Comparison Between Old and New Access Models, in Nielsen, Erland
Kolding and Saur, Klaus G and Ceynowa, Klaus, Eds. Die innovative
Bibliothek : Elmar Mittler zum 65.Geburtstag, pp. 95-106. K G Saur.
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00003918/

One of the reasons for open access archiving is simply that - archiving.  
This is one of the reasons behind the NIH Public Access Policy.  
PubMedCentral is fulfilling a new function of access, along with an old
one - preserving the medical literature, long the preserve of the U.S.
National Library of Medicine.  Our institutional repositories, among other
things, provide us a means to ensure that the work of our faculty is
preserved, regardless of whether a publisher continues to value it for its
purely economic value.

Many thanks to David Prosser for self-archiving!  And to Peter Suber's
Open Access News for pointing to this article.

cheers,

Heather G. Morrison