New Wine in Old Bottles: Current Developments in Digital Delivery and Dissemination

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to identify and assess current developments in scholarly publishing in Europe. Current models for disseminating content have limitations and Open Access models of publishing have been endorsed by the European Universities Association. The Harvard mandate for the deposit of materials in Open Access repositories is a bold new development, and the community is watching it with interest. It is possible that e-books may be the next large form of content to be made available to the user. Users certainly express interest in using this form of material. However, current library systems need to be developed in order to cope with this mass of new content. E-theses, available in Open Access from institutional repositories, are a form of content that is made much more visible than the paper equivalents. The DART-Europe portal, supported by LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) currently provides access to 100,000 research theses in 150 European Universities. At an institutional and academic level, however, much remains to be done to embed Open Access into the landscape: the current situation is described in a new report for UCL (University College London), produced by RAND Europe.