Quite to the contrary, the new web environment is creating ‘a seeming limitless range of opportunities for a faculty member to distribute his or her work (y) [T]hese forms of informal publication have become pervasive in the university and college environment. As scholars increasingly rely on these channels to share and find information, the boundaries between formal and informal publication will blur’ (Ithaka Report, 2007: 3). The future of open access can thus be best understood through a holistic approach, taking into account the new trends in disseminating research materials no less than the new habits in locating them (Borgman, 2007). After all, the moral incentive to publish through an open access channel largely stems from our awareness that we can now get most of our research materials for free. Other, no less important, boundaries are rapidly being redefined. One of the main aims of scientific communication has always been to overcome national and linguistic boundaries. Prior to the advent of the Internet and electronic publishing, English had already become the lingua franca for a large majority of scholars (Laponce, 2004). The web has strengthened this trend. This, however, has not led to outright dominance by American scientific output. Quite to the
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The notion of publication arising from this overview of the main changes of institutional, commercial and individual actors shows a radically different picture from only ten years ago (Kaase, 2000). Access to scholarly sources of all types has enormously grown by size, speed and openness. Institutions have turned themselves into major publishers in their own right, by making their century-old collections available online to everyone in every part of the world, and mostly eliminating the time factor, as all type of classics and rare materials are ‘born again’ to an electronic life. Commercial publishers have reacted by invading the institutional territory through direct distribution and oligopolistic control of current electronic publications, starting with journals and now moving into the book domain, especially with the new multimedia formats. On their side, individual scholars are discovering the advantages of self-archiving and self-publication, promoting reputational channels that partly bypass the traditional peer-review-based systems. While we have presented these three actors in their different, emerging traits, they are by no means separate entities.
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‘Commercial publishers have reacted by invading the institutional territory through direct distribution and oligopolistic control of current electronic publications, starting with journals and now moving into the book domain’.
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branch of the Working Group of the Networked Digital Library of Thesis and Dissertations.26 With over 120,000 items, DART-Europe appears to be a useful instrument for the scientific community, but also as a powerful tool for dissemination of research items that would otherwise remain unknown. On a smaller scale, Cadmus27 is a repository of articles, working papers, chapters and theses based at the European University Institute, with thousands of full-text documents available. In France, Tel28 is a similar service developed by the Centre pour la Communication Scientifique, with access to over 16,000 full-text theses.
mauro calise et al
european political science: 9 2010
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