Open Access News

In a posting today to the AmSci forum (not yet archived) author Michael Kurtz says that Section 9 of this paper shows that "the entire cost of the journals is tiny compared with the efficiencies gained by having full electronic access to the literature in a discipline. In astronomy, where essentially every professional astronomer has had total electronic access to the entire journal literature for five or six years, the value of that access, in terms of increased efficiencies of research, is about twenty times the total production cost of the core journals."

At their January 2003 meeting, the members of the MLA Board of Directors approved a motion to revise the copyright policy for the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA). As is the case with most scholarly journals, the JMLA routinely required authors to sign a form transferring all rights to the association. Late last summer, that policy was challenged by several MLA members who pointed out that it was somewhat contradictory that at a time when we, as a profession, were urging the scholars that we serve to pay more attention to preserving their own copyrights, we, as a professional society, were still demanding that our own authors give up those rights.

During the fall, then, a new copyright policy was devised that acknowledges that JMLA authors retain the rights to their work. MLA is given the right of first publication and the right to republish the work in whatever fashion the JMLA may be republished in the future (for example, as part of an aggregated database). Individuals wishing to make copies of articles for educational, nonprofit purposes are still entitled to. But the authors are now free to make whatever further use of their work they wish, and, if some other person or entity wants to republish or make some other use of the work in the future, they need to get those permissions directly from the authors.

I am very grateful to the members of the JMLA editorial board, the chair and incoming chair of the publications committee, and MLA headquarters staff who helped craft the new policy. And I am especially grateful to those MLA members who challenged us to put our policy where our principles are. The new policy is posted on MLANET and takes effect with this issue.

Kudos to JMLA for this reform!

LJ: Let's first address the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Is it important to tout the open access issue, as they are doing, to the general public through a public awareness campaign?

PS: If money and energy were very tight, there would be more important audiences to address with this message --for example, researchers, librarians, university administrators, professional societies, publishers, and foundations. But when we can, we should fight on all fronts at once and addressing the general public with this message does matter. First, there are many fairly obvious ways that Congress and federal funding agencies can help the cause of open access. One legitimate way to get their attention is to awaken voters. Second, taxpayers have a proper concern that their money be spent in the public interest. If their money supports research and publications to which they -- and the doctors, nurses, hospital staff, and medical researchers working on their behalf-- have no access without a second payment, then they should be told that this happening. In the long run, taxpayer support for corrective measures may matter more than anyone else's. Third, the general public is the ultimate beneficiary of open access. I don't want to go over the top, but open access is not a small matter about the economics of journal publishing. It's about sharing knowledge, and sharing knowledge is one of the conditions of civilization. The general public should definitely be concerned about it.