Why Epage@Tech?
Georgia Tech is a worldwide center of excellence for engineering, technology, and scientific innovation. Dissemination of GT innovations must happen globally and promptly for maximum impact in today's world. The Electronic Press @ Georgia Tech, a GT library-managed service, will provide a digital platform to disseminate GT-produced knowledge rapidly to information users at any time, in any Internet-ready location they reside, and will preserve that knowledge digitally for future learners to come. Epage is an important program because:
- Georgia Tech's intellectual output should be managed and preserved by Georgia Tech
- Research indicates increased citation impact for research available freely online (see References below)
- Researchers are already using e-print servers (PubMed Central, PLoS, arXiv, CogPrints)
- Granting agencies increasingly tend to require open access archiving or long term posting of research outcomes (i.e. NSF, NIH)
- Serials costs to libraries rise dramatically every year
Georgia Tech Open Access
and Scholarly Communication
The scholarly communication crisis refers to the current and future erosion of access to the scholarly literature resulting from the inability of institutional library budgets to keep pace with the steeply rising cost of journal subscriptions and scholar's loss of rights to their works as a result of signing away copyright.
One response to this crisis is the Open Access (OA) Movement. In its purest form, Open Access publishing provides immediate, free public access to scholarly publications on the Internet, whether in the form of open access journals or through some form of archiving.
Epage@Tech is Georgia Tech's response to this crisis in scholarly communication.
Endorsement
"ITID is the first and only MIT Press journal to be published as Open Access and our collaboration with the Georgia Tech Library has been critical to the journal successfully managing this new publication model. The Library's support and leadership is ensuring that ITID will have more impact, a richer and more collaborative online environment, and will be better able to serve a world-wide epistemic community. The entire ITID team - including the editorial office, the MIT Press, and the Georgia Tech Library - will together help define the future of scholarly publication.”
Dr. Michael Best
Sam Nunn School of International Affairs
and the College of Computing
Co-founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief, Information Technologies and International Development
References
D-Lib Magazine, “Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals.” Vol. 10, No. 6, June 2004. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/harnad/06harnad.html
Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, “Open Access – Maximizing Research Impact in the Internet Age.” Vol. 20, No. 4, Oct 2006. http://tinyurl.com/quhd3
Nature, Correspondence, “Free Online Availability Substantially Increases a Paper’s Impact.” Vol. 411, No. 6937, 31 May 2001. (unedited version) http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/
PLoS Biology, “Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles.” Vol. 4, No. 5, May 2006. http://tinyurl.com/jn8gv