Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning

What are they?
A study by Halliday and Oppenheim (2001) examined the development
of electronic journals, reviewing cost and pricing developments and
concluded that there appears to be no relationship between production
costs and the subscription prices of scholarly journals. They argue that
journals are priced according to what the market will bear, but, at the
same time, the market is inelastic. As a result, prices have consistently
increased annually at a rate well above the general inflation rate for the
last two decades. These changes have been referred to as a ‘serials crisis’
or crisis in scholarly communication and it has been the impetus for a
number of developments that aim to use digital technology to reduce
costs for the higher education sector. Developments include alternative
models of journal production, such as the setting up of institutional
repositories, and initiatives that aim to influence the structure of the
market for scholarly journals with a view to driving prices down such as
the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
SPARC was formed in the United States in 1998 by the Association of
Research Libraries (ARL) as a movement to counteract this
commercialisation and stranglehold that publishers have on scholarly
publishing. The movement is an alliance of universities, research libraries
and organisations. SPARC argues that market dysfunctions in the
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The digital library
scholarly communication system have reduced the dissemination of
scholarship and crippled libraries. However, some commentators like
Professor Stevan Harnad
26
believe that, rather than a frontal attack on
commercial publishers, open archives should be established. Authors
should deposit their research output in e-print repositories at their own
institutions and data from these repositories can be harvested globally.
Why are they valuable?
JISC recognised that there are numerous internal and external
advantages of e-print repositories to institutions, including benefits:
■
to researchers through wider and more rapid dissemination of their
work, resulting in more ‘research impact’;
■
to students, as university publications are readily accessible via the
institution’s virtual learning environment, library system and
institutional portal;
■
to the university from a higher profile by making all output publicly
(and freely) available. Additionally, the university benefits by having a
comprehensive, managed and preserved record of its research output,
instantly available for research assessment or related exercises;
■
e-print repositories offer clear advantages to e-learning, as they allow
valuable institutional resources to be made available without licensing
or copyright issues. They are also significant as these initiatives are
usually led by librarians. This gives the profession an important role
in communicating the benefits to the academic community.
E-prints in the US, UK and Australia
These developments have led to a growing interest in the US, UK and
Australia in the set-up of institutional e-print repositories. One of the
world’s leading open-source initiatives is at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) with its DSpace Project,
27
a digital repository to
capture, distribute and preserve MIT’s intellectual output. MIT stated
that these archives may provide more efficient open access to research
than the commercial journals.
In the UK, numerous projects, again funded largely by JISC, have been
established to explore the technical aspects of setting up e-print archives
and the wider implications for higher education. Several of these projects
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Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning Environment
have been funded under the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources
(FAIR) Programme
28
and ePrints UK
29
is one such project funded for
two years and due for completion in July 2004. The project is developing
a series of national, discipline-focused services through which the higher
and further education community can access the collective output of e-
print papers. These will be available from compliant open archive
repositories, particularly those provided by UK universities and colleges.
JISC also funded the SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for
Research Preservation and Access) Initiative
30
under the FAIR
Programme, which is investigating issues regarding the development of
openly accessible institutional digital repositories in universities. The
University of Southampton has been leading much of the developments
with the Open Citation Project.
Developments in Australia were led by the Australian National
University (ANU), following an initiative by the university librarian,
Colin Steele. Steele published an account of developments to date (Steele,
2002) and described how the first e-print repository was established at
ANU on 1 September 2001. By August 2002 the repository held 317
‘documents’ covering material from pre-prints to refereed articles and
from conference papers to books. In 2002, a ‘roadshow’ was funded and
led by key staff at ANU to explain, facilitate and promote the concept of
e-print repositories. Following this, initiatives were established at the
University of Queensland, Sydney and others.