From Peter Suber's blog.
Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] -------------------------- Nancy Davenport on scholarly communication and OA Andy Carvin has blogged some notes on Nancy Davenport's keynote address at the University of Missouri conference, Open Access, Open Source, Open CourseWare: Sharing as a Solution to the Digital Divide (Columbia, February 22, 2006). Davenport is the president of Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Excerpt: Scholarly Communications. What are the issues? What are the options? What are the leadership issues?...Scholars are the supply and the demand. Research has to be distributed, through print, e-format, open access, repositories, self-publishing, even blogs. Who is in the middle, mediating scholarly discussions? Societies, reviewers, publishers - for profit and nonprofit - aggregators, librarians, provosts, administrators, the Internet....Digital scholarship: only way to integrate disparate content, allows new research and scholarship, encourages using material in new ways, creates new fields and communities of practice, creates new knowledge. CLIR call to action: tells publishers that librarians want independent, third party preservation of your content. "The academic community is built upon a sham. More and more you don't own your content - you're paying rent." What impedes open access? The academic reward system. Tenure requires publishing in "the right journals." Scientists can put open access fee into their budgets. But in the humanities, you don't get that kind of funding. PloS.org won't work for most humanities scholars....Where are we now? We pay a lot of money. Most institutions are paying 24% for digital serial journals in their collections budget. Libraries each pay large fees to access the same material. Meanwhile, libraries are digitizing their own special, unique materials.