23 September 2009
Universities Work Toward Open Access to Research
Five major research universities sign compact
Washington — Before the Internet, many took for granted that scholarly journals were something to which libraries and individuals subscribed. But now there are a variety of other venues open to scholars using both fee-based and free models that are aimed at putting the latest knowledge in the hands of people who need it.
Five of the top research universities in the United States signed a compact September 14 that is expected to make the latest scholarship even more readily available to scholars and researchers around the world.
Cornell University, Dartmouth University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California at Berkeley signed the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity. The compact commits the universities to providing funds for their faculty to publish in so-called “open-access” journals, many of which charge authors a fee for publication.
“The dissemination of research findings to the public is not merely the right of research universities: it is their obligation,” said MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif in summing up the compact. “Open-access publishing promises to put more research in more hands and in more places around the world. This is a good enough reason for universities to embrace the guiding principles of this compact.”
Although the five compact signers are not the first universities to launch funds to pay publication fees at fee-based open-access journals — more than 20 worldwide have done so — the new compact represents “a large incremental advance,” says Peter Suber, a professor of philosophy at Earlham College and a fellow of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center and Harvard University’s Office for Scholarly Communication. “The five are major research institutions with significant influence, and … the compact expressly encourages other institutions to join the effort,” added Suber. In many countries, the cost of traditional subscription scholarly journals is prohibitive, and libraries at even the most heavily endowed universities in the United States and Europe are finding it increasingly difficult to afford their spiraling costs.
The rising cost of gaining access to the latest research and scholarship has given impetus to what is sometimes known as the open-access publishing movement, but the debate over what “open access” should mean has been contentious. This has been especially true since the well-known Budapest Open Access Initiative, launched in 2001, defined open access to mean “permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these 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.”
Today, there are many open-access scholarly journals and archives that are online and free of charge. They typically either are funded by a subsidy from a hosting university or professional society or charge the author a fee when accepting an article (with fees usually waived in cases of economic hardship). Their traditional subscription counterparts typically charge readers.
Open-access journals provide the same services common to all scholarly journals, such as management of the peer-review process, filtering, production and distribution.
But groups such as the American Association of University Presses (AAUP) argue that “open access need not be limited to journals and can also be achieved through other models, such as those that combine some form of market-based cost recovery with free access for users a certain length of time after initial publication, or that offer free access to one form of publication and paid access to others.”
If articles are available for free, critics ask, will the money still be there to cover the cost of peer review and publication? Is open access compatible with copyright and the continued existence of traditional publishers?
Suber regards open-access journals as a “superior system of scholarly communication.” They accelerate “research by removing the access barriers which cause delay, duplication, expense, exclusion and error.” Other benefits may include larger audiences for an author’s work, reduced expenses for universities and increased return on investments for government and funding agencies, he said.
The journals opposed to open access say they incur considerable staff, capital and operational costs managing the peer review system.
A recent report, The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations, found that the average cost of publishing one page in major humanities and social science journals was more than twice what it cost in science, technical and medical journals. The report concluded the open-access publishing model “is not currently a sustainable option” for the humanities and social sciences.
A study published in the journal Science in February 2009 found that, while open-access articles were used more in the developing world, articles available for a fee were cited more often in the professional literature. The study was based on data from more than 26 million articles in more than 8,000 scientific journals dating back to 1945.
Publishers and researchers “know that their traditional business model is creating new walls around discoveries,” said Thomas C. Leonard, university librarian at the University of California at Berkeley, in the compact announcement. “Universities can really help take down these walls and the open-access compact is a highly significant tool for the job.”
More information on the compact is available on a Web site devoted to it.
