e-lis: e-prints in library and
information science
A case study
example for ISI 5162, Global
Communication and Information Policy Winter 2014
Heather Morrison
E-LIS http://eprints.rclis.org/ is the
open access archive for library and information science (LIS). My perspective,
as an open access advocate, former member of the E-LIS editorial and governance
teams and current passionate supporter of this initiative, is that E-LIS is an
excellent illustration of good practices in open access, library and information
science, and global collaboration in action. E-LIS provides a venue for LIS
authors and journals to meet open access requirement policies that are
increasingly common among research funders and universities. On the flip side,
services like E-LIS, by providing this venue, make it easier for
decision-makers (journals, publishers, research funders and universities) to
develop open access policies, by removing one of the potential objections (i.e.
no venue).
Open access literature, according to
Suber (n.d.), is “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright
and licensing restrictions”. Open access was defined in 2002 at three major
international meetings, held at Budapest, Berlin and Bethesda; the resulting
definition is called the BBB definition of open access (Suber, n.d.).
The
first of these meetings was the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) (2002),
which in addition to defining open access, developed a visionary statement
which from my perspective is less often quoted, but of greater significance,
particularly in the context of global communication and information policy. The
words are carefully crafted and beautifully expressed, and so repeated here in
full:
An
old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented
public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to
publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for
the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The
public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the
peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to
it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.
Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich
education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the
rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for
uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge
(Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002).
E-LIS
exemplifies the spirit of the Budapest vision, in my opinion. The E-LIS
team consists of the generous
hosting and support services provided by the CILEA consortium in Italy, a governance
team including E-LIS co-founders Antonella de Robbio and Imma Subirats, whose
work in this initiative I have described earlier on the OA Librarian blog
(Morrison, 2005a; Morrison, 2005b), and volunteer editors from around the
globe. Information about E-LIS can be found on the E-LIS About page http://eprints.rclis.org/information.html
which includes a statement that dovetails with the BOAI vision: “Searching or
browsing e-LIS is a kind of multilingual, multicultural experience, an example
of what could be accomplished through open access archives to bring the people
of the world together”. From a personal perspective, to me this is a major and
refreshing change from the typical western-centric focus of most search engines
found in North American libraries. Not every archive is fully open access,
however E-LIS has a strong commitment to open access and does not accept works
unless the full text is openly available.
The
global E-LIS team can work with any language that LIS scholars might wish to
use to participate in this initiative. Currently 22 languages are supported;
all works are expected to have abstracts in English. English and Spanish are
the most common languages. Most of the works in E-LIS are peer-reviewed journal
articles, and many other types of works are of similar scholarly quality, such
as refereed conference proceedings and theses, as described by Morrison,
Subirats-Coll, Medeiros and De Robbio (2007) in an invited, non-refereed article
in The Charleston Advisor.
As
explained in BOAI (2002), there are two basic approaches to open access, open
access publishing or making works open access in the process of publishing,
sometimes known as the gold road, and open access archiving, making works open
access through archives or repositories, sometimes called the green road. There
are two major different types of open access archives, institutional archives
(or repositories) and disciplinary or subject repositories. E-LIS is an example
of the latter. Some of the best-known subject open access archives are
PubMedCentral, arXiv (for physics, math, computing science and related
disciplines), and the Social Sciences Research Network. Seamless searching and
full-text retrieval are key attractions of subject based archives.
Libraries
are frequently the host of their institutional repositories or archives; for
example, see the Canadian Association of Research Libraries’ (n.d.) Institutional Repositories page. From my perspective, this presents a challenge
to E-LIS as a subject archive, as libraries working to build and support a
local institutional repository may see deposit in a subject repository like E-LIS
as extra work at best and as competition at worst. It is my hope that in time
LIS professionals, once institutional repositories become the ubiquitous
service that I hope and expect they will become, will return to the vision of
the “unprecedented public good” of a global, multilingual and multicultural
service like E-LIS, and work to cross deposit all LIS articles in BOTH the
local institutional repository and E-LIS, and that, in time, E-LIS will not
only be a good option for searching for LIS scholarship, but the first, and
often the only stop.
References
Budapest Open Access Initiative
(BOAI), 2002. Retrieved Feb. 4, 2014 from
Canadian Association of Research
Libraries. N.d. Institutional
Repositories Project.
Website.
Retrieved Feb. 4, 2014 from http://carl-abrc.ca/en/scholarly-communications/carl-institutional-repository-program.html
Morrison,
H.; Subirats-Coll, I.; Medeiros, N. and
De Robbio, A. (2007). E-LIS: the Open
Archive
for Library and information Science. The Charleston Advisor vol. 9, n.
1. Retrieved Feb. 4, 2014 from http://eprints.rclis.org/10158/
Morrison, H. 2005a. Antonella de
Robbio. OA Librarian. Retrieved Feb. 4, 2014 from
Morrison, H. 2005b. Imma Subirats
Coll. OA Librarian. Retrieved Feb. 4,
2014 from
Suber, P. n.d. Open access overview.
Retrieved Feb. 4, 2014 from
Comments and
mark: overall, not bad - you appear to know the initiative and open access
quite well and this shows some good analysis and interesting ideas. On the
other hand it looks like you threw this piece of writing together in about an
hour and could have done a much better job with more effort. For example, the
text is a bit short – only 4 pages – and a substantial amount of this is direct
quotes. There is a lot of self-citation and this work would benefit from a
broader literature review. B- (HM)
