[Dspace-general] DSpace, institutional repositories and commercial digital libraries owned by publishers

[Andrew Marlow]

hello DSpacers,

I realise that DSpace is designed to be primarily for institutional
repositories but I wonder if it could also be used as the
implementation basis for a digital library owned by a publisher. Now
we know that publishers charge a fortune for access and this is
unsustainable. Eventually it must give way to open access, but the
current business model may have as much as another 10 years of life.
So please bear with me while I propose extensions to DSpace that may
have such a lifetime......

If Dspace could be used in this way for that time then I see that
publishers would have a level playing field for the features their
digital library has. So they would be distinguished primarily by
content. This would be in accordance with their links and
relationships with societies and institutions. So I don't see it
harming open source at all, and I think it would promote healthy
competition among the publishers. It reminds me of companies that
provide streams of financial data. Eventually the software
infrastructure for that will be open source and the companies will
have to compete on the quality and breadth of the data.

With this in mind, I wonder if DSpace would ever consider adding
features that publishers would find useful. Some sort of fulfillment
system springs to mind. This would involve, as a bare minimum,
recording customers and their licenses. A fulfillment system can be
large and complex so it might be enough to just store the minimum for
DSpace to determine if the user has access to the requested article
and assume that the billing etc is done externally. It would also be
useful if DSpace could report on the usage statistics on a per
customer level, as well as for all customers. A fancy system would
also allow customers to be grouped into consortia.
-- 
Regards,

Andrew M.
http://www.andrewpetermarlow.co.uk