Year-End Investments Towards Open Access

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@ELN.BC.CA>]

With the EU Petition for Guaranteed Public Access to 
Publicly-Funded Research topping 20,000 signatories (more than 
1,000 institutional), and the historic Belgian signing of the 
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences 
and Humanities, no doubt many libraries are giving some thought 
to the transition to open access.

For those with a little year-end funding, here are some 
suggestions on investments to help prepare for an OA future:

Purchase a LOCKSS box.  Those open access journals your faculty 
are developing or publishing will need to be preserved, as will 
your local open access repository.  So do your subscription 
resources and access to them, for that matter.

Buy a server and hardware for those locally produced journals 
and/or your open access archive.

Invest in open access resources, such as the Stanford 
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  This is a particularly interesting 
model for year-end funding; the idea is to build an endowment 
fund for perpetual open access, with funding commitments designed 
to be roughly equivalent to three years of subscriptions to an 
encyclopedia of this nature.

Host a workshop on open access publishing and/or self-archiving.

For more details, please see my blogpost on The Imaginary Journal 
of Poetic Economics, at: 
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/02/year-end-investments- 
towards-open-acces.html

Heather Morrison, M.L.I.S.
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com