Caveat Lector » Blog Archive » John Wilbanks keynote, SPARC Digital Repositories 2008

Description

Digital publishing is just “a bigger earhorn” because we’re still thinking that the way to communicate is through writing papers. We’ve made that better, faster, and cheaper, but the process is basically the same; boil it down to 8.5×11 pages.

Process change comes more slowly than product change.

So why is it hard to get this content? Why don’t faculty see the light?

- stable systems are resistant to change on multiple levels. No one thing will make people wake up; there are interlocking barriers to change. One such barrier is copyright, which locks up the container of the facts, not the facts… but it really locks up that container!

So we’ve moved to leasing materials, not owning them; and licensing makes it harder to unlock those facts from their containers. No indexing allowed; no adding hyperlinks.

Rights clearance is a pain! It is a block preventing process disruption. We haven’t provided enough incentive, enough “universal solvents,” to remove these blocks. Now we’re even seeing copyright applied to databases (e.g. ChemSpider). What do the ideas behind CC mean, as they propagate into the scholarly realm? The rights problems are going to get MORE, not LESS complex; forcing IRs ...

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