Re: What if open access publishers close down

[David Goodman <dgoodman@princeton.edu>]

BMC is doing what is necessary in an excellent manner, and so is JSTOR,
and many others, including several of the large commercial publishers,
such as Elsevier. I suggest that it is not quite enough for publishing
organizations and libraries to rely on these arrangments alone.

We need assurances that all such content is properly handled, and that in
each case multiple properly maintained sources are available. We need
assurances that the quality of these archives is tested and certified. We
need arrangements so that each individual library does not have to verify
this separately for each individual source.

Though the primary responsibility for these arrangments is of course the
publisher, it is the proper role of the library profession to organize and
certify these arrangments. This is the analog of what librarians have done
with printed material and also with earlier archiving media.

Are there such projects or proposals underway?

Dr. David Goodman
Princeton University Library
and
Palmer School of Library & Information Science, Long Island University
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: Jan Velterop <jan@biomedcentral.com>
Date: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 11:11 pm
Subject: What if open access publishers close down

> In response to Jim Robinson's question about what would happen 
> were BioMed Central or similar Open Access publishers to close down, I 
> hope to reassure him and all other readers of this list that one of the 
> key elements in the BioMed Central definition of Open Access is the 
> guaranteeof future free availability of the material published 
> (see definition
> here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/charter).
> 
> The future free availability of research articles is an intrinsic 
> part of Open Access. The articles are not just freely available, but can 
> also be downloaded, stored, archived, distributed further, even sold 
> (should anybody be interested in paying for what's already freely 
> available), without prior permission and on the basic conditions only 
> that the author(s) is/are acknowledged and properly cited/referenced, 
> and that no substantive changes are made without declaring what they 
> are.
> 
> BioMed Central is an avid supporter of LOCKSS 
> (http://www.lockss.org/),which aims to find safety in redundancy, 
> and we currently deposit all our published articles in full in 
> PubMedCentral in the US and INIST in France.Many university libraries 
> also download and archive portions of BMC material. All BMC articles, 
> including those published by BioMed Centralfor independent journals 
> such as the Malaria Journal (http://www.malariajournal.com), are 
> OAI-compliant and the full-text can be 'harvested' by any OAI-harvester. 

[SNIP]
> Jan Velterop
> BioMed Central