Towards a Continuum of Scholarship

Newly posted to E-LIS and DLIST is a very interesting and thoughtful paper and presentation by OA Librarian Blog team member Marcus Banks. Marcus takes a very long-term of the transformative potential of open access, going back to 1966 with the U.S. Department of Education making ERIC freely available, and looking far into the future, when the increasing availability of grey literature thanks to institutional repositories will make the distinction between grey and non-grey literature disappear.

This paper is highly recommended reading for the OA advocate, even the well-read OA advocate, as Marcus covers a number of concepts and key historical pieces that we don't hear about all the time, such as the scholars who began publishing freely available online journals in the 90's on their own, and Dr. Harold Varmus' 1999 proposal for e-Biomed, which eventually inspired PubMedCentral. Much important health literature is actually grey literature; making this body of work more available is a very important, not peripheral function for institutional repositories.

Banks, Marcus A. (2005) Towards a continuum of scholarship : the eventual collapse of the distinction between grey and non-grey literature. In Farace, Dominic, Eds. Proceedings GL7 : Seventh International Conference on Grey Literature, Nancy (France).

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.