Digital Libraries, Digital Repositories and the Commons
Full disclosure first: I organized this panel (thanks to wonderful SIG-DL colleagues) and was also a presenter. Now that we have that out of the way, here comes the real story :).
The Competing Information Realities session (Monday, Nov. 6, 1:30 - 3:00 pm) engaged a room, filled to capacity, of eager, curious, smart people with three very distinguished panelists and, as noted above, me too :). The planning for this session was started last year by SIG DL when the issue of institutional repositories (IRs) and open access archives (OAA) emerged as a topic of great interest. To actually have the session happen today, in an informal semi-debate format, with expert, relevant panelists, and with audience enthusiasm and interaction at such a high level is awesome. Refreshingly, there were no powerpoints (thanks to Don for the suggestion, Edie and Sam for helping it and me along)! (BTW, original proposal can be found here (~4 pages) and it is worth a read too.)
First, Edie Rasmussen set the stage by defining digital libraries, digital commons, and commons-based peer production of knowledge models. The commons, in this context, are our intellectual public domain, for the most part the information resources that are no longer in copyright. She explained why the digital library (DL) is a good model for managing the commons and briefly identifed the many issues faced by the DL such as the usable information retrieval of massive amounts of text, presentation, and copyright. Her examples included the Digital Library of the Commons and dLIST, Digital Library of Information Science and Technology, the first open access archive for the information sciences. I spoke next. Access to information is a cherished principle for most of us in the information disciplines and professions, but my survey (promoted at ASIS&T 2005 among other places) did not find self-archiving to be a practice in our communities. (Note that self-archiving is a practice that with the aid of digital repositories technologies empowers individuals to increase access to information. For the purposes of the survey self-archiving was defined as making one’s intellectual works available in an OAI-compliant repository.) However, open access is of great interest and value, and self-archiving is being cautiously and innovatively explored. This provides a rich opportunity and fertile ground for ASIS&T to lead in the shaping of the commons for the information sciences. Don Kraft, Editor of ASIS&T’s scholarly journal, JASIST, underscored the importance of open access but was also fair-minded. His opening line pointed out that information like water should be free but somebody must pay for the piping (infrastructure). Sam Hastings’ spontaneous rejoinder, “Can’t we sort of just lick it?” (or something similar) allowed Don, with seriousness and humor, to point out features of the problem that is yet to be solved: the economic sustainability of open access for scholarly journal publishing, where both the container (journal) and the publisher add value in the current, prevalent model. Sam Hastings’, (Editor of ASIS&T Monographs), was the final speaker and she brought us back full circle to what is after all an open access vision and reality but with a twist - publishers are helping to add the value to the networked book, of which an example is McKenzie’s Gamer Theory.
The final half of the session was a panel and audience interaction about the competing information realities we face today as a scholarly society: open access versus closed. Questions were raised about the ASIS&T digital library. The need for sustainable economic models for open access was recognized. Solutions for the economic cost of open access were suggested (embargoed open access - that is OA after a period of time, limited open access, etc.). There wasn’t much doubt that open access increases a field’s cumulative research advantage. The consensus solution(s) seemed to be that experiments and multiple approaches hold promise: for example, open access through OAA for some types of materials (preprints, conference papers, datasets) and paid/closed access for others. I could go on but I won’t as my break is over. I will try to come back later and share more questions and answers that were explored here as they are well worth sharing.
Add comment November 7th, 2006 at 03:47pm anita.coleman