ERIC is in jeopardy. A project of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), ERIC is the Educational Resources Information Center, and by far the most the comprehensive and venerable open-access resource in the field of education. The problem in a nutshell is that the ERIC Clearinghouses, which collect and index the material in the ERIC database, come up for reauthorization this year. But the DOE offices that oversee ERIC and its Clearinghouses are being reorganized, and the current plan shrinks the ERIC system and eliminates some of the Clearinghouses. Kate Corby has created an extremely useful web page on the threat to ERIC, covering all the relevant issues, players, actions, and dates. See her page, especially her log of open letters, for ideas on how to help ERIC survive.
The problem isn't exactly like last November's defunding of PubScience, which was the result of a deliberate, anti-FOS lobbying campaign by a trade association of commercial electronic publishers. But the effect might be the the defunding of another government-supported open-access resource, this time a much more significant one. ERIC is older, larger, and much better entrenched in its niche than PubScience was. It was launched in 1966, tying with Medline as the oldest known open-access initiative. ERIC is "the largest education database in the world --containing more than 1 million records of journal articles, research reports, curriculum and teaching guides, conference papers, and books." [FOS News]