Five universities join open-access compact… Make yours next!
September 20th, 2009 by Parker HigginsEarlier this week, five prominent research universities unveiled the latest demonstration of their commitment to open-access research and publishing. Harvard, Cornell, Dartmouth, MIT, and UC Berkeley have become the inaugural signatories of the new Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity, an agreement to set up programs to provide the publication fees that are sometimes required by open-access journals.
Stuart M. Shieber, Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University and one of the originators of the compact, discussed the idea behind it last month in an article in PLoS Biology, one of the current leading fee-based open-access journals that stands to benefit from the compact. “Open-access journal publishing,” he writes, “is at a systemic disadvantage relative to the traditional model.” While traditional journals receive tremendous subsidies from universities, both in the free services provided by faculty writing and peer reviewing the articles, and then the sometimes exorbitant subscription fees paid by university libraries, open-access journals were, to this point, not given the same advantages.
The Compact would reverse that disadvantage, giving a chance to the newer, freer business models of open-access journals.
We view this as a great step forward for open-access research, and very much in line with the principles we set forward for how an “open university” should behave. As we establish the criteria for evaluating the openness of a university, this kind of measure is precisely the kind of effort on the part of schools that we hope to recognize.
The Compact is currently seeking additional signatories through their contact form. Please contact them and try to get your school involved! These five universities are high-profile enough that this move is definitely noticed throughout the world of academia; we should take advantage of this moment and momentum to get more universities involved and expand the pool of open-access content.
September 20th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
[...] up programs to provide the publication fees that are sometimes required by open-access journals. More Here Posted by Chris Filed in Open Access Leave a Comment [...]
September 21st, 2009 at 10:51 pm
ON NOT PUTTING THE GOLD OA-PAYMENT CART BEFORE THE GREE OA-PROVISION HORSE
Full posting: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/630-guid.html
SUMMARY: Universities need to commit to mandating Green OA self-archiving before committing to spend their scarce available funds to pay for Gold OA publishing. Most of the university’s potential funds to pay Gold OA publishing fees are currently committed to paying their annual journal subscription fees, which are thereby covering the costs of publication already. Pre-emptively committing to pay Gold OA publication fees over and above paying subscription fees will only provide OA for a small fraction of a university’s total research article output; Green OA mandates will provide OA for all of it. Journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled unless the journals’ contents are otherwise accessible to a university’s users. In addition, the very same scarcity of funds that makes pre-emptive Gold OA payment for journal articles today premature and ineffectual also makes Gold OA payment for monographs unaffordable, because the university funds already committed to journal subscriptions today are making even the purchase of a single print copy of incoming monographs for the library prohibitive, let alone making Gold OA publication fees for outgoing monographs affordable. Universal Green OA mandates will make the final peer-reviewed drafts of all journal articles freely accessible to all would-be users online, thereby not only providing universal OA, but opening the doors to an eventual transition to universal Gold OA if and when universities then go on to cancel subscriptions, releasing those committed funds to pay the publishing costs of Gold OA.
January 6th, 2010 at 7:05 pm
I usually don’t post in Blogs but i found this absorbing thanks