Open Access News

When the Federal Public Research Access Act was proposed this year, scholarly society after scholarly society came out against the legislation, which would require federal agencies to publish their findings, online and free, within six months of their publication elsewhere. The future of academic research was at stake, the societies said, and both their journals and the peer review system could collapse if the legislation passed.

It is increasingly hard, however, to say that those societies reflect the views of academe on the issue. In July, the provosts of 25 research universities came out in favor of the legislation, saying that the current system of research publishing leads to outrageously high journal costs that are harming libraries and making it impossible for people to follow research. Now the presidents of 53 liberal arts colleges — at the behest of their librarians — are issuing a joint letter backing the legislation. And while it is unlikely that the bill will pass this year, the new letter that was released Tuesday is part of a broader effort by open access supporters to place higher education in a new position when the debate is renewed next year.

Nancy S. Dye, president of Oberlin College, where the new letter was organized, said that her interest was in part — but only in part — financial. “All liberal arts colleges are finding it more and more difficult to purchase the materials we need,” she said. But Dye stressed that there is also “a philosophical view” that is spreading: “Knowledge is made to be shared.” And while that may sound idealistic, Dye said there is another “underlying view” that makes sense to her and other presidents. “If this research is being done with federal money, it would only seem right that the people who are paying taxes have access to the research findings.” ...

The letter from the liberal arts college presidents is straightforward. It says that their institutions can’t afford rising journal prices, that their faculties and students want more access to journals than the institutions can provide, and that liberal arts colleges play a key role in producing future Ph.D.’s, so their exposure to journals matters. Oberlin is among many liberal arts colleges with unusually high percentages of graduates who go on to earn doctorates....

Presidents signing the letter...were organized by the Oberlin Group, an organization of the libraries of liberal arts colleges....

Ray English, director of libraries at Oberlin, said that the current system is “fundamentally unstable,” adding that “I’ve been looking at these issues for more than a decade now, and it’s clear that there are problems of access to research that are such that we need transformational strategies.”

Diane Graves, university librarian at Trinity University, in Texas, another of the institutions backing the letter, agreed. “The current model is broken so it’s time for new models. Staying with the status quo is unsustainable.” ...

As for the scholarly societies, Graves said that she knew that they did valuable work, but questioned why that work needed to be subsidized by journals. “A lot of societies have relied on journals to fund other activities. But why should libraries at colleges — nonprofit entities within nonprofit entities — fund those activities? Shouldn’t members be funding those activities? We need to have this conversation.”

Barbara Allen, director of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which coordinated the [first] letter from university provosts, said she was thrilled to see the liberal arts college presidents joining the effort. “I think administrators are starting to feel emboldened to speak out and to draw their faculty into the conversations,” she said....

PS: Read the whole article. To focus on the college presidents' letter, I had to cut some good background on new ACS AuthorChoice program, announced yesterday, and some new and desperately bad arguments from the AAP against FRPAA.  (Allan Adler of the AAP "rejected the idea that taxpayer financed research should be open to the public, saying that it was in the national interest for it to be restricted to those who could pay subscription fees. 'Remember — you’re talking about free online access to the world,' he said. 'You are talking about making our competitive research available to foreign governments and corporations.'")