One of the librarians at this university showed me a clause linked to a major educational funding organization that required grant recipients to make their written papers from research findings available to other professionals in the field through a related educational repository < http://www.lib.k-state.edu/geninfo/scholcomm/nih.html >. This endeavor is part of a larger effort to capture informational value for the larger public apparently.

This clause is an interesting one to me because of the endeavor to push out into the public information that might be protected otherwise.

Homegrown Repositories

Various universities have set up their own informational repositories, too, to capture pre-final-drafts of their professional papers (known as “author’s versions”), which they then publish in final form in professional journals—often only after negotiating some rights back for themselves and their host institutions. At a fairly recent intellectual property conference I attended, universities often spend a lot of money to “buy back” copyright for items that their own faculty sign over in their rush to publish (not perish). There is plenty of pressure to publish and to have a presence for those in academia.

A UK-based site SHERPA / RoMEO (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/) tracks progress in this area.

A Union Catalog of Digital Resources

The Open Archives Initiative offers a union catalog of digital resources by harvesting metadata from open sites but on the deep or invisible Web, which may not be as easily probed by browsers. This endeavor increases the searchability of the digital contents, particularly on the Invisible Web; this will end the stealth publishing that has occurred for years on the Web.

One metric of success is how many times a source is cited, so there are benefits to such endeavors. This also enhances the accessibility of self-archived writing in the various university repositories.