Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
point of university research in a collective sense.
The collecting of publications for research assessment exercises such
as the UK's Research Evaluation Framework (REF) and Australia's
Excellence in Research Assessment (ERA) provides university platforms
for the initial stocking of repositories. In this process, OA e-books can
just as easily be collected and/or linked within the segments of the
repository. As a by-product of these repository downloads, there is no
reason why downloads and associated metrics should not be considered
in assessment procedures.
California eScholarship is now one of the success stories in the
distribution of institutional scholarship. This repository is part of the
California Digital Library initiative. The research and scholarly output
that it includes are selected and deposited by the individual University
of California units. On 2 April 2009 the website recorded 35,042 full-
text downloads of repository content in the previous week, while total
full-text downloads to that date were 8,026,215.
Commercial publisher OA initiatives
It is relevant in this context that in late 2008 the major UK publisher
Bloomsbury (publisher of the
Harry Potter
series) established an 'on-
demand' imprint which would publish titles online for free (Pinter,
2008). Bloomsbury Academic will use Creative Commons licences to
allow non-commercial use of all its titles online as soon as they are
published, with revenue being generated from print copies sold using
short-run technologies and POD. This is apparently the first time a
commercial publisher has devoted a whole imprint to the model.
Pinter notes:
It's a totally different paradigm. . . . If you start with the assumption that
everything you access should be paid for at the point of use, then what we
are doing is charity. If you take the view that the Internet should be more
of a library and less of a bookstore, and that one way of funding the
publishing process is through those who access books, then free [online]
access is not charitable, it's just part of the way you do business. . . . I am
going to have to sell enough copies of my books to keep my business
alive. I expect to lose a few sales [because the material is available online
