On 5-Oct-04, at 1:53 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote:
What has to be resisted is librarians' instinct to go all and only for gold (OA Publishing), even though 100% gold would of course solve 100% of their serials crisis! Yes, the golden road of OA Publishing is to be encouraged and supported, but it is an extremely slow, indirect and uncertain road to 100% OA, whereas the green road of OA self-archiving is a fast, direct and certain one, already fully within immediate reach.
The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) is very actively engaged in setting up institutional repositories at all of Canada'a research universities. For more information: http://www.carl-abrc.ca/frames_index.htm Some institutional repositories are in operational mode, while others are in planning mode. Librarians are, of course, very much encouraging faculty to support the development and filling of these institutional archives. To me, as a librarian, it makes perfect sense to fully support both the green and the gold roads. We need the green road - right now - in order to provide maximum access to current (and past) publications by our faculty. As we look into the future, publishing methods that take into account the need for open accessibility just make sense. For that matter, in order to facilitate preservation, my personal belief is that we need self-archived copies in our institutional repositories, even for articles that are published as open access in the first place. Given the ease of copying electronic information, this is not as costly as one might at first glance assume. cheers, Heather G. Morrison Project Coordinator BC Electronic Library Network ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Phone: 604-268-7001 Fax: 604-291-3023 Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.eln.bc.ca
