For information of the list, what I have called the Titanium Road to Open access is briefly described as follows:

·       Keeping an corpus (opus?) of all the works produced as a researcher is a completely natural thing for a researcher

·       I fully expect (just as typewriter -> Word) that this archive box function will silently transition to the electronic social media such as Mendeley.

·       Open access to such corpus of work is trivial to achieve, though legality of OA to Versions of Record is questionable.

·       This process can be encouraged and facilitated.

·       If as many people used such functions as use Word to compose articles, we’d have close to 100% OA now!

·       Discovery is a non-issue.

My thinking which led to this conclusion was worked out in four unpublished essays, which if you are interested you can read at http://eprints.utas.edu.au/12526/ under the title “The Titanium Road Essays”.

Where I am going in the essays is not always clear, but I think they are entertaining and worth reading.

Arthur Sale

University of Tasmania, Australia

On 12/15/2011 07:17 PM, Arthur Sale wrote:

Thank you William.

I had previously come to the conclusion that institutional repositories were simply failing to reach enough acceptance to reach the OA revolution tipping point, and open access journals are struggling. My analysis a year or so ago was that the social media model (such as Mendeley) offered a model which would result in rapid takeup, particularly by younger, active, researchers. I wrote four essays (and I called this route the Titanium Road) which alas I have forgotten to upload to the University Repository and make OA. I will do so asap and let the list know when they are available.

Please do. I love the "Titanium road" label, as it emphasizes preservation over merely who's paying.

However, there is another key issue that nobody has yet responded to. Besides synchronizing Mendeley (excellent), can we get rid of the horribly clunky repository deposit interfaces? Being an 

The DURA project is aimed squarely at the deposit problem. A researcher simply links his account with his local institutional repository via Symplectic, drops his publications in the "My Publications" folder and that's it. No forms, no manually entered metadata (but a researcher can make manual edits if necessary).

Best wishes for Christmas and New Year. I look forward to Mendeley’s subversive activities in the future!

Here's a little taste of what you have to look forward to: http://www.slideshare.net/KazuhiroHayashi/presentation-of-victor-henning-at-nistep-seminar-on-dec-8-2011 If you know the history, you can skip forward to about slide 36 or so.

Arthur Sale

Emeritus Professor of Computer Science

University of Tasmania, Australia