|
 | Aftershocks: Blogosphere Reacts to Harvard OA Mandate
Librarians and faculty members at other institutions are reacting positively to Harvard University's historic faculty motion last week to mandate open access (OA). A scan of the blogosphere suggests that Harvard's vote is poised to serve as an effective motivator for other institutions to push forward their own open access/institutional repository policies. This is, after all, Harvard. "When Harvard does something, all the others follow," blogged one scientist at Blog Around the Clock. "Perhaps this is the tipping point for Open Access as a whole?"
On Caveat Lector, George Mason University library's Dorothea Salo mused on the "sly cleverness" of Harvard's strategy—and notably pointed out the potential de-fanging of publishers' well-worn argument that open access undermines peer review. "They can't seriously spin this as 'a vote against peer review,' because really, is Harvard going to do anything that damages peer review?" Salo asks.
Villanova law professor and copyright expert Michael Carroll suggested the motion increases Harvard's competitive edge, arguing the "impact and citation of Harvard scholarship will increase because it is freely accessible." In addition, "Harvard librarians will get greater expertise than exists at competing institutions at developing, managing, and adding value to the university's digital library," he wrote, because they will simply have more scholarship to manage. "Faculty at competing institutions should take note," Carroll wrote. "There's an early mover advantage to be had here."
University of California, Davis, researcher and Public Library of Science supporter Jonathan Eisen wrote that Harvard's motion is a smart—if disruptive move. "Sure, there are some potential downsides to open access. Some journals do good things and they may have to reinvent themselves to continue to bring in revenue," Eisen acknowledged. "But welcome to the 21st century. It is not like other industries, like music and TV and movies and electronics and so on, have not had to reinvent themselves."
In a thoughtful post, Anna Creech, the Eclectic Librarian, wondered about the short-term practical impact of Harvard's policy on junior faculty. "I am concerned that the short-term consequences will be increased difficulty in junior faculty getting their work published, thus creating another unnecessary barrier to tenure," she wrote. "Don't get me wrong—repositories are a great way to collect the knowledge of an institution's researchers, but they aren't the Holy Grail solution to the scholarly communication crisis."
Publishers have been deafeningly quiet regarding the mandate so far, but in a response in the Scientist, publishing consultant Joseph Esposito said the Harvard policy could benefit commercial open access publishers like BioMed Central and Hindawi. "If OA is the future (and Harvard says it is), then the publishing community is not going to sit back and let their businesses slip away. I imagine that all of the large commercial STM publishers have studied their acquisition options," Esposito noted. "We should not be surprised to see the likes of Springer, Reed Elsevier, John Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Wolters Kluwer taking out the checkbook."
With so many practical questions still without answers, the Harvard mandate, wrote Michigan librarian Paul Courant, serves as a meaningful first step. "The big news in the Harvard vote is that it helps all of us to focus on the main point—that scholarly publishing, through a variety of mechanisms, is first and foremost about making scholarship public, not making money."
For more reactions, see Peter Suber's Open Access News blog.
|
|
History Monograph Program Gutenberg-e Goes Open Access
Historian and Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton is on an open access (OA) roll. In addition to the groundbreaking news out of Harvard last week, another project in which Darnton was a catalyst, the Columbia University Press Gutenberg-e Project, is going OA. According to a release from the American History Association, the dissertations published under the Gutenberg-e program are now freely available through the Columbia University libraries an open-access and via the ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB).
The news, however, isn't all good. In a sobering reminder amid all the recent open access euphoria, AHA's Robert Townsend, writing on the AHA web site conceded that the project is not yet financially sustainable. "Unfortunately, despite the hopes of many in the open access movement, we have not been able to create a sustainable financial model for the publication of these online scholarly monographs." Townsend wrote. "Our success to date was only made possible by the very generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the library and press at Columbia University. The incorporation of the Gutenberg-e series into ACLS Humanities E-Book has been made possible by the Press's additional investment and HEB's own sustainability model."
The program, chartered in 1999 in an effort to promote digital scholarship in history, will fulfill its mandate and publish all 36 monographs that received prizes, and will continue to make those titles available. The program, however, is completed and remains suspended.
In addition to financial challenges, Townsend suggested that the Gutenberg-e monographs have also failed to gain wide acceptance in the field, saying that part of the motivation for offering them via open access was to encourage their use. "One of the great concerns for this project has been the seeming reluctance or inability of many scholarly journals to review these online publications," he conceded. "Since the traditional networks of scholarly legitimization seem unable or unwilling to handle these books, we hope this switch to open access will circumvent that problem by making the works more discoverable by interested students and scholars."
Fortunately, he added, the limited review attention hasn't hurt the Gutenberg-e winners in their careers: all who have come up for tenure received it. Despite financial and advancement issues, Townsend said, the forward-looking program was a success. "We firmly believe that these books stand as models of exceptional scholarship in the discipline and rich examples of how new media can transform the traditional monograph form."
|
| CLIR Issues Report on Digital Preservation
A new study from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation suggests that in an age of mass digitization it is time to reassess best practices and put forth a practicable preservation strategy. Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization: A White Paper, by Oya Rieger, interim assistant university librarian for digital library and information technologies at the Cornell University Library, examines four "large-scale digitization initiatives (LSDIs)" (Google Book Search, Microsoft Live Search Books, Open Content Alliance, and the Million Book Project) to identify issues that will influence the long term availability and usability of the digital books these projects create.
While much of the attention thus far focuses on the unprecedented access these projects afford, Rieger examines what steps should be taken now to improve the usability of these resources into the future and offers a series of recommendations for how "participating libraries and digitizing partners can secure, or improve, a long-term return on the LSDI investment." Among Rieger's recommendations:-
Reassess digitization requirements for archival images: Prevailing digitization standards and best practices were established 15 years ago, Rieger notes. We need new digitization metrics that are based on current technologies, quality assessment tools, archiving practices, and evolving user needs.
- Develop a feasible quality control program: The library community should negotiate "rigorous technical specifications with digitization partners" to ensure that quality control is "an assurance process" rather than a frontline strategy for catching missing or unacceptable images.
- Enhance access to digitized content: "Digital content that is not used is prone to loss." Thus, archiving investments will be more worthwhile if efforts are made to improve discovery, access, and delivery.
- Support shared print-storage initiatives: "Research institutions will be pressured to justify investments in maintaining their legacy print collections." Consolidation of holdings in a shared storage environment can save space and national and regional shared-storage efforts demonstrating strong leadership need firm support from the library community.
- Reenvision collection development for research libraries: Research libraries must consider how future selection and acquisition decisions will be shaped in light of increased online content and worldwide access to core collections.
The study is available electronically, and print copies will soon be available for ordering through the CLIR web site, for $20 per copy plus shipping and handling.
|
| NJ Community College Absorbed into PL System
Burlington County, NJ, is the site of an unusual, perhaps unique collaboration: the library at a two-campus community college has been incorporated into the Burlington County Library System (BCLS). The collaboration, BCLS director Gail Sweet explained, was driven by economics and convenience. The county system and the Burlington County College (BCC) library had shared an online catalog for about a decade, but because the systems were separate, any interlibrary loan required significant amounts of paperwork. Also, she said, the "college was trying to be everything to everybody, and with diminishing resources, they needed to be more curriculum-driven."
Under the new system, the BCC library will focus on academic materials and give up spending some 30 percent of its budget on popular materials and DVDs. The system also means BCLS library delivery vans will include the college campuses. BCC, meanwhile, has an extensive genealogy collection of more than 3000 items, which was not being used by the public, Sweet said. It will be moved to the BCLS central facility. The merger will be evaluated after a one-year pilot. "We have not merged funding," Sweet noted, adding that the public library is funded by the county while most of the college's funding comes from the state. The four employees at the BCC library will remain college employees.
|
Library Journal Academic Newswire
Contributing Editor: Andrew R. Albanese
Phone: 646-746-6852 E-mail: aalbanese@reedbusiness.com
Editor: Francine Fialkoff
Phone: 646-746-6807 E-mail: fialkoff@reedbusiness.com
Executive Editor: Rebecca Miller
Phone: 646-746-6725 E-mail: miller@reedbusiness.com
News Editor: Norman Oder
Phone: 646-746-6829 E-mail: noder@reedbusiness.com
TO UNSUBSCRIBE
To unsubscribe send an e-mail to Unsub_Academic_Newswire@email.libraryjournal.com
TO SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe to Academic Newswire or our other newsletters
Subscribe to Library Journal magazine
ARCHIVE
Read past issues
PRINT
You must change your print settings from portrait to landscape to print this page.
VIEW OUR PRIVACY POLICY
Click here
QUESTIONS?
If you need further assistance with your newsletter subscription, please contact our Online Support Staff.
Send editorial questions about this newsletter to: aalbanese@reedbusiness.com.
RBInteractive: onlineads@reedbusiness.com, (888) 7RBI-WEB.
PRIVACY MANAGER: privacymanager@reedbusiness.com
Reed Business Information 2000 Clearwater Drive Oak Brook, IL 60523 | Fax: 630-288-8394
© 2007 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2008 Library Journal. All rights reserved.
"Library Journal" is a registered trademark. "Library Journal Academic Newswire" is a trademark.
|
