Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

The Internet has brought unparalleled opportunities for expanding availability of researchby bringing down economic and physical barriers to sharing. The digitally networkedenvironment promises to democratize access, carry knowledge beyond traditional research niches,accelerate discovery, encourage new and interdisciplinary approaches to ever more complexresearch challenges, and enable new computational research strategies. However, despite theseopportunities for increasing access to knowledge, the prices of scholarly journals have risensharply over the past two decades, often forcing libraries to cancel subscriptions. Today even thewealthiest institutions cannot afford to sustain all of the journals needed by their faculties andstudents.

To take advantage of the opportunities created by the Internet and to further theirmission of creating, preserving, and disseminating knowledge, many academic institutions aretaking steps to capture the benefits of more open research sharing. Colleges and universities havebuilt digital repositories to preserve and distribute faculty scholarly articles and other researchoutputs. Many individual authors have taken steps to retain the rights they need, under copyrightlaw, to allow their work to be made freely available on the Internet and in their institution’srepository. And, faculties at some institutions have adopted resolutions endorsing more openaccess to scholarly articles.