An Electronic Archive for Academic Communities

Three Dutch scientific communities started the Roquade project: the Library of Utrecht University, the Library of Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services (niwi) (1). The Roquade project aims at enhancing scientific communication in the interest of the academic community. The control of most of its scientific output was outsourced for ages to specialised craft: publishers. But the document management tools that are ubiquitous today, and the fact that the scientific author and the scientific user are members of academic communities, if not colleagues in a virtual project, pressures universities to look after their scientific information. Most likely, every academic community will eventually organise the management of its scientific output via the library. The library is the organisation to control written knowledge in any form: journal articles, preprints, scientific reports, scientific presentations, contributions to scientific discussions and others; and it will have the role of facilitator and stimulator of related developments. The time path for this development in the library is not clear, but it could go fast. As Stevan Harnad once remarked: if a significant number of universities worldwide would mount and use archive software, the freeing of the research literature in a global public archive could take place within months.