hello DSpacers, I realise that DSpace is designed to be primarily for institutional repositories but I wonder if it could also be used as the implementation basis for a digital library owned by a publisher. Now we know that publishers charge a fortune for access and this is unsustainable. Eventually it must give way to open access, but the current business model may have as much as another 10 years of life. So please bear with me while I propose extensions to DSpace that may have such a lifetime......
If Dspace could be used in this way for that time then I see that publishers would have a level playing field for the features their digital library has. So they would be distinguished primarily by content. This would be in accordance with their links and relationships with societies and institutions. So I don't see it harming open source at all, and I think it would promote healthy competition among the publishers. It reminds me of companies that provide streams of financial data. Eventually the software infrastructure for that will be open source and the companies will have to compete on the quality and breadth of the data. With this in mind, I wonder if DSpace would ever consider adding features that publishers would find useful. Some sort of fulfillment system springs to mind. This would involve, as a bare minimum, recording customers and their licenses. A fulfillment system can be large and complex so it might be enough to just store the minimum for DSpace to determine if the user has access to the requested article and assume that the billing etc is done externally. It would also be useful if DSpace could report on the usage statistics on a per customer level, as well as for all customers. A fancy system would also allow customers to be grouped into consortia. -- Regards, Andrew M. http://www.andrewpetermarlow.co.uk _______________________________________________ Dspace-general mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/dspace-general
