Open access and the tricky issue of maintenance

Paul Duguid reviews Gary Hall's Digitize this Book! The politics of new media, or why we need open access now in the TLS (July 31, 2009). Digitizing books and journals not only makes them easily accessible, they should also be openly accessible to all, not locked behind subscription and license walls. Sorting through the polemics of removing paper from documents, Duguid makes the following very practical remark in regards to open content access:

Hall's own contribution is CSeARCH, a repository for cultural studies monographs. Unfortunately, rather than endorsing his ambitious argument, a look at CSeARCH suggests once again that the concept of digitization may seem simple, but its economic, political, and academic reality is not. CSeARCH is ten years old. It has accumulated about 450 titles. Worringly for Hall's thesis that cultural studies is at the vanguard, the arc of acquisitions shows steady growth to a height of about a hundred works uploaded in 2006, followed by a dramatic falling off, with only fifteen uploads in the past three years. As to the content, several are not in fact monographs but articles...and some are no more than links to e-texts on other websites. These not only defer responsibility for authority, integrity and authenticity to sites such as nothingness.org, they also evade responsibility for the tricky issue of maintenance. Yet true openness, Hall's espoused goal, assumes commitment to a maintained, in principle ever-open archive...and maintenance... is a demanding and expensive institutional responsibility, of which there is little sign at CSeARCH.