The Santa Fe meeting may not have been the birth of Open Access, but it fired the starting gun for interoperable institutional repositories based on what later became the OAI protocol (OAI-PMH). I wasn't at that meeting, but if I recall one of the motivations was to find ways of spreading the open access provided by (what is now) arXiv to disciplines beyond its core sciences. arXiv was a little under 10 at the time.
If we were anxious to speed progress then, such that after 10 years of arXiv a new repository architecture (based on RePEc) was proposed for everyone else, how do we feel about progress after 12 years of IRs (although to be fair, the real acceleration in growth of IRs did not begin until some 5 years later). Do we need another Santa Fe moment? Steve Hitchcock WAIS Group, Building 32 School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 9379 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 9379 On 20 Oct 2011, at 00:49, Stevan Harnad wrote: > I hate to have to throw a blanket on this 12th birthday parade, but the birth > of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) (a protocol for making online > bibliographic databases -- initially called "archives," later re-baptised > "repositories -- interoperable) in 1999 certainly was not the birth of the > Open Access Movement. > http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/vandesompel-oai/02vandesompel-oai.html > > Either the Open Access Movement began (as I prefer to think) in the '80s or > perhaps even the '70s, when (some) researchers first began making their > papers freely accessible online in anonymous FTP archives, or it began with > the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI, 2001) where the term "Open Access" > was first coined (a few months after, just as "Open Archives" was coined a > few months after the Santa Fe meeting). > http://www.soros.org/openaccess > > Nothing here to compete in primacy for, however, since the progress of the OA > movement has been dismayingly slow, ever since, and still is, to this very > day. > > But it's particularly ironic to see the origins of the OA movement (warts and > all) attributed to OAI when in fact the idea of freeing the refereed research > literature from access toll barriers was very explicitly (and exceedingly > rudely) disavowed by the prime organizer of the three organizers of the Santa > Fe meeting. The archival record for this seems to have disappeared, but I've > saved the two postings from which the following is excerpted: > > Tue, 30 Nov 1999 20:14:30 -0700 > "â¦someone also forwarded me from the times higher ed supp 12 nov 1999: > > "Harnad, who attended the Santa Fe meeting, said all conference participants > agreed that scientific and scholarly publishing was being 'held hostage' and > needed to be freed. 'They all felt ... . Most wanted...'" > > "i don't remember anyone saying anything about hostages (though i did miss > the end of the first day) -- isn't it demagoguery to impute words and > sentiments?..." > > The rest of the posting expands on these sentiments: > > http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/oai1.htm > http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/oai2.htm > > 30 November will also be the 12th anniversary of the last time I ever > exchanged words with the prime organizer in question. > > Stevan Harnad > > On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 4:23 PM, Eric F. Van de Velde > <eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.com> wrote: > > From my blog at http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/ > > > > The Birth of the Open Access Movement > > > > Twelve years ago, on October 21st 1999, Clifford Lynch and Don Waters called > > to order a meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The organizers, Paul Ginsparg, > > Rick Luce, and Herbert Van de Sompel, had a modest goal: generalize the High > > Energy Physics preprint archive into a Universal Preprint Service available > > to any scholarly discipline. (Currently known as arXiv and hosted by Cornell > > University, the HEP preprint archive was then hosted at the Los Alamos > > National Laboratory.) > > > > This meeting constructed the technical foundation for open access: the Open > > Archives Initiative and the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). > > It coined the term repository. (Yes, it was a compromise.) It inspired > > participants. Some went home and developed OAI-compliant repository > > software. Some built or expanded institutional and disciplinary > > repositories. Some started initiatives to raise awareness. > > > > At the meeting, there were high-flying discussions on the merits of > > disciplinary versus institutional repositories. Some argued that > > disciplinary repositories would be better at attracting content. Others > > (including me) thought institutional repositories were easier to sustain for > > the long haul, because costs are distributed. In retrospect, both sides were > > right and wrong. In the years that followed, even arXiv, our inspirational > > model, had problems sustaining its funding, but the HEP community rallied to > > its support. Institutional repositories got relatively easily funded, but > > never attracted a satisfactory percentage of research output. (It is too > > early to tell whether sufficiently strong mandates will be widely adopted.) > > > > There were high hopes for universal free access to the scholarly literature, > > for open access journals, for lower-priced journals, for access to data, for > > better research infrastructure. Many of these goals remain high hopes. Yet, > > none of the unfulfilled dreams can detract from the many significant > > accomplishments of the Open Access Movement. > > > > Happy Twelfth Birthday to the Open Access Movement! > > -- > > --Eric. > > > > http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com > > Google Voice: (626) 898-5415 > > Telephone: (626) 376-5415 > > Skype chat, voice, or web-video: efvandevelde > > E-mail: eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.com > > >
