Open Access Publishing
June 2nd, 2008 Posted in UncategorizedI recently attended a library conference in Timberline, Oregon. The keynote speaker, Ray English, Director of Libraries at Oberlin College, discussed what is currently happening with “open access” scholarly journals; these are the journals that do not require an individual or institutional subscription in order to read the articles. These journals are “free” to the reader, but not of course to the publisher, and there are numerous different ways organizations, societies and publishers are finding to fund these publishing efforts.
Ray has researched this topic in depth, has been on the steering committee for SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) for a number of years. Through articles in print and online, speaking engagements, and committee work, he strongly advocates for supporting open access journals. At our conference, he estimated (based a recent study) that 20% of currently published, peer-reviewed journals are open access.
If the estimate is accurate or close, it’s pretty significant for libraries and for scholars. If open access gains wider acceptance by scholars in the future, it could mean broad changes in how academic libraries present information, as well as improve the budget picture for library materials, budgets that are currently predicted, even here at UAF, to decline in future years.
I would like to encourage faculty on campus to read about, think about, and discuss among themselves, the movement toward open access scholarly publishing. I will pull a few literature reviews on the topic and post them here for convenience, and I encourage all in the UAF community to add their thoughts about open access, including what they think about the current efforts, their own acceptance (or not) of the concept, or any other discussion about scholarly publishing.
