Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
to ensure 'public funding, public access, public good' will undoubtedly
continue. We can only distribute and access effectively what we own.
Universities are also recognizing the need for change in access for a
variety of reasons. The economic downturn has impacted severely on
library budgets, particularly, for the first time in decades, in the USA. The
research community there has been largely protected until now by the
strength of its libraries, but with 50% of Harvard's library acquisition
budget being funded from endowment returns, even the world's richest
university is feeling the pain. Is it any coincidence that Harvard's OA
policy emerged in 2008, attempting to protect the copyright of its
research output and to ensure its effective distribution on a global scale?
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced in March
2009 that it will make its research available to the public free of charge,
becoming the first US university to mandate the policy across all
departments. MIT's policy is based on that adopted by Harvard's Faculty
of Arts and Sciences in 2008, and retains non-exclusive publication rights
for its authors to advance research and education by making them
globally available (Lauerman, 2009). Academic e-monographs can readily
be accommodated in such frameworks.
At the time of writing, in mid 2009, a number of the major
commercial US publishing houses are experiencing significant
downturns in their operations, as indeed are major bookseller chains
such as Borders and Barnes & Noble. The editor of
Publishers Weekly
(before she left the company in late January 2009) was quoted as saying
that 2009 would be 'the worst year for publishing in decades'. Many
commercial publishers have thus decided to utilize new social media in
order to promote their publications. Ettinghausen (2008) reported that
Penguin at that time had:
5,000 friends on Facebook, we're on Twitter, and were the first to go into
Second Life, where we took William Gibson, the writer who invented the
word cyberspace. We don't believe books will disappear - 99 per cent of
our revenue still comes from ink on paper - but the way people read will
change. People have shorter attention spans - a website has about three
seconds to capture their attention. As a result we are spending time
learning from what Nike, Sony, Xbox, YouTube do - we're competing for
people's entertainment time, particularly with a young audience.
