Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Conclusion: vision for the future
Overall availability of scholarly information will be of utmost
importance in the future. The information should be available with a
single mouse click, at any time and anywhere. It should be reusable in
any form or format, and data mining, text mining and sampling should
be allowed. These expectations extend not only to born-digital works,
but also to analogue works stored in libraries, archives and museums.
These are expected to be available for researchers, teachers, students
and also a wider audience. Institutions of higher education invest large
amounts in the establishment and management of digital repositories
and work hard to make their scholarly output as open as possible. OA,
Open Content and open data are becoming part of an overall
framework within universities, and the information provided by those
institutions is becoming a fundamental component of public research
information.
Partnerships and governance structures
As demonstrated earlier, to achieve the goal of the broadest availability
of scholarly output, co-operation between the stakeholders is very
important. With regard to digitization, online accessibility and digital
preservation of Europe's collective memory, Europe has introduced
another form of co-operation between the parties involved, which
operates within the framework of applicable copyright and intellectual
property law. According to the European Commission, public-private
partnerships can play an important role in Europe's efforts to digitize its
cultural heritage. Private partners can bring to the table the funding,
technology, software and expertise required for large-scale digitization.
By combining this with the experience in resource discovery and user
requirements of cultural-heritage institutions, public access to
collections can be enhanced. However, public-private partnerships
involve some risks. Such partnerships must be managed very carefully
to prevent them from ending in failure and the material to be digitized
thus never becoming available for access on reasonable terms. The
allocation of ownership of copyright and of other applicable intellectual
property rights after digitization needs to be clearly stated.
Furthermore, to be successful, several other starting points need to be
taken into account.
