[OAI-general] OAIster terms/conditions

[Peters, Dale]

You are right of course, services are the key, and shared services are
integral to research infrastructures.  Yet as Boyle points out
"Infrastructure is the thing that we always fail to fund because it's kind of
everybody's problem, and therefore its nobody's problem."  (Nature 461,2009,
p162)

 

Since the membership drive seems to be taking care of itself, COAR will focus
on networking international repository federations, including, but not
limited to the DRIVER infrastructure.  Discussions are underway ahead of the
launch in October on agreements on data sharing, domain or range of data to
be exposed or shared, feasibility planning  and implementation of data
exchange, possible mirroring or replica services, interoperability standards,
etc.

 

The task of building a sustainable business model for OA resources is
enormous, and its urgency is underlined by the  vulnerability of OAIster.  

 

Regards,

Dale

 

 

On 23 Sep 2009, at 22:12, Peters, Dale wrote:

	An alternative to the systematic commercialisation of Open Access
data is the formal constitution of COAR: the Confederation of Open Access
Repositories, scheduled to take place in Open Access Week 2009.
http://www.driver-repository.eu/DRIVER-COAR.html

Apart from the fact that "systematic commercialisation" is a bit of an
exaggeration, can you explain exactly how a repository organisation is going
to provide "an alternative" service model?  Surely building other services is
the alternative? Shouldn't there be a "Confederation of Open Access Services"
????

	Emerging as the sustainable outcome of the DRIVER infrastructure,
COAR is a community-driven approach, where institutions can determine how
they want their repositories to be deployed.

Institutions already determine how they want their repositories to be
deployed. It is true that the majority of them don't publish policies for
metadata and data reuse (according to data from OpenDOAR), so that state of
affairs should be improved upon.



The action plan is directed towards international organisational support for
Open Access in research infrastructures around the globe. 

I applaud this but it is (according to the website) COAR's *second* goal set.
Its first goal set is to maintain the DRIVER confederation. Does this mean
that COAR is a membership club whose first allegiance is to its own continued
existence? Will membership drives will be the first thing on the agenda and
where membership marketing and advocacy will take priority over OA marketing
and advocacy?

--

Les

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.openarchives.org/pipermail/oai-general/attachments/20090925/9e6bf577/attachment.htm