Today's post is part 1 of a series on Openness that I plan to do over the next few weeks.
Open Access and the Crisis in Scholarly Publishing
In honor of Open Access Week I thought it fitting to launch a series on openness with a post on the Open Access movement and it's increasing relevance to universities such as Tufts.
For readers who may be new to the subject, the open access movement got its start in December 2001 at a conference hosted by the Open Society Institute of Budapest, where scholars assembled to express support for open access to scientific and scholarly journal literature. The simplest definition of OA, arising out of this conference, holds that open access literature is literature that is scholarly in nature, digital, available online, free of charge and free or most copyright and licensing restrictions.
The primary driver behind the open access movement has been changes in the scholarly publishing industry, which have resulted in skyrocketing prices and the inability of libraries to keep up with subscriptions to scholarly journals. Over the past several years, journal prices have risen 320% while library budgets have increased by a fraction of that amount. Tufts University currently spends $4 million on journal subscriptions. The skyrocketing costs of academic journals limits the ability of university libraries to keep up their subscriptions and in turn greatly reduces dissemination of scholarly research. By removing price and permission barriers that often limit access to scholarly publications, open access publishing offers the potential to mitigate this crisis in scholarly communication and to ensure wider dissemination of academic research and knowledge at greatly reduced costs to scholars and institutions. Equally as important, it allows authors to retain more of their intellectual property.
There are many things that academics and institutions can do to increase the impact of their research and help mitigate the crisis in scholarly publishing. Chief among these is to Manage your intellectual property by negotiating with publishers. Most journals require authors to sign a copyright transfer agreement upon publication, which cedes copyright to the publisher. Increasingly however, publishers are allowing authors to retain portions of their copyright through the use of an author addendum or amendment to publication agreement. Signing an amendment to publication enables an author to retain more rights over the use of their publication and to upload a copy of their work to an institutional repository that's open. Another way of promoting open access is to use alternative methods of publishing such as self-archiving in open access repositories or publishing in open access journals, an increasing number of which are peer-reviewed and considered high-impact. Finally, support sustainable scholarly communication by wielding influence with your publishers, becoming a proponent in your department for open access, and support legislation to make publicly funded research free.
For more information on Open Access at Tufts, see the Scholarly Communication Team website.
