Digital Collections and Repository Program (D-CARP): Initiatives

Scholarly communication is an umbrella term used to describe the process of academics, scholars and researchers sharing and publishing their research findings.  The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) have promoted the involvement of research libraries in scholarly communication activities since 2002 when the Scholarly Communication Initiative was launched.

The term “Open Access” (OA), the free online availability of research literature, was first coined at an Open Society sponsored meeting in Budapest in December 2001. OA was defined as free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. OA would permit authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

e-Science is a term used to describe the set of tools, technologies and new research methodologies required to support computationally intensive collaborative science carried out in highly distributed network environments. It refers to science that creates/gathers and stores vast amounts of data and uses immense data sets to perform research that require extremely powerful networks and massive electronic storage capacity.