While Stevan's push for 100% coverage of academic materials within OA repositories is on target, I still believe that we need a more reliable and universal infrastructure for decentralized repositories ... one that includes long-term support, which means funding for all authors and organized R&D for enhanced navigation.
The present loose federation of existing D-Space (and other) and possible FEDORA-based institutional repository (IR) platforms does not yet offer the scalable design that we require in order to develop integrated tools with universal storage. Perhaps we need to devlop a blend of IRs and discipline-based repositories (a la arXiv) in order to provide platforms and navigation for all users -- not just those in organizations able to run their own IRs? We have the technology, now we need to focus our support on a plan that provides universal storage and access ... with or without the peer review overlay for the present time. David David Stern Director of Science Libraries and Information Services Kline Science Library New Haven, CT 06520-8111 email: david.e.st...@yale.edu Quoting Stevan Harnad <har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk>: > University Open Access (OA) Resolutions, even toothless, purely abstract > ones with no concrete policy proposals, are better than no University OA > Resolutions, one would have thought, just as some sort of NIH OA Policy > is better than none (one would have thought). [SNIP] > The only thing universities need to do in order to make the content that > they themselves already provide openly accessible is to keep on > publishing it in journals exactly as they always have done, but in > addition, to make an online copy of it openly accessible to all would-be > users webwide who cannot afford the official published version -- by > self-archiving a supplementary draft of every published article in the > university's own OA eprint archive. [SNIP] > Let us hope that other universities (US and non-US) as well as research > institutions and research funders world-wide will not copy/clone diffuse > and directionless statements/resolutions such as Columbia's and > Berkeley's but instead include the critical concrete component {1} that > will convey us all at long last to the optimal and inevitable (and long > overdue) outcome for research, researchers, their institutions, their > funders, and their funders' funders, the tax-paying public: 100% OA > > Stevan Harnad