Re: a preservation experience

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

I do not think we are going to agree. National libraries in much of the
world have successfully archived print for a very long time. They have
been funded by government. All the ones I know are very well aware of the
problems of archiving digital publications. In the UK (where I do know
what is going on) the British Library have put their cost projections to
government and the recently passed Legal Deposit Act reflects government
commitment. The actual Act is at

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmbills/026/03026.1-6.html

and the British Library press release is at

http://www.bl.uk/cgi-bin/press.cgi?story=1382

I do not believe in Jan's interpretation of KB plans. In a presentation at
the STM seminar in Amsterdam in the spring their director made it very
clear that government funding was finite.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jan Velterop" <jan@biomedcentral.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 11:03 PM
Subject: RE: a preservation experience

> Responses interweaved. Jan Velterop, BioMed Central
>
> > 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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