Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, January 03, 2008

"OA must remain a priority for the library community...."

ACRL Research Committee, Environmental Scan 2007, Association of College and Research Libraries, January 2008.  Excerpt:

...Over the past decade, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has undertaken an ongoing environmental scan to identify the trends that will define the future of academic librarianship....

Top Ten Assumptions for the Future of Academic Libraries and Librarians....

1. There will be an increased emphasis on digitizing collections, preserving digital archives, and improving methods of data storage, retrieval, curation, and service....

Institutional repositories provide access to one of the most dynamic venues for digital content creation, curation, and service. The literature on repositories is broad, and touches upon (among other things): auditing trusted repositories and metadata; creative approaches to developing institutional repository services; managing new data types; and discussions on future institutional repository development paths....

4. Debates about intellectual property will become increasingly common in higher education....

The OA movement and Web 2.0 applications such as Wikis promote information sharing, while at the same time information is becoming a valuable commercial commodity. Scholarly communication is being reshaped by advances in technology and by the growing realization on campuses that the high cost that libraries must pay for journals is to a significant extent the result of faculty members giving up intellectual property rights to their research....

Efforts such as the Creative Commons <creativecommons.org/>, MIT Open Courseware <ocw.mit.edu/index.html>, SPARC <www.arl.org/sparc/>, and various OA publishing initiatives that facilitate the sharing of intellectual content and permit scholars to retain certain rights to intellectual property are becoming more popular....

Librarians must continue to work with faculty and professional organizations to persuade them to use OA to scholarly works. Efforts such as the Creative Commons, SPARC, institutional repositories, and other OA publishing initiatives that facilitate free access to scholarly material should be supported.

OA to federally funded research must remain a priority for the library community....

9. Demands for free, public access to data collected, and research completed, as part of publicly-funded research programs will continue to grow.

Recent literature on Open Access reflects the extensive growth of this relatively new movement to make publicly funded scientific research freely available to the public. High profile OA initiatives like Highwire Press, Public Library of Science (PLoS), BioMedCentral, and others have attracted the attention of scholars interested in supporting improved publishing models (Walters, 2007; Park and Qin, 2007). In the past few years the promotion of OA has expanded beyond libraries and has gained the support of many governments, the United States and the European Union in particular, the scientific community, publishers, funding agencies, and the general public (Albert, 2006). The National Institutes of Health have supported legislation requiring that the results of government-funded research be made freely available to the public online (Engelward and Roberts, 2007). As this report goes to press, the U. S. Congress continues to debate this issue. Similar legislation was also proposed in the European Union (EU), but ultimately lost support due to pressure from the publishing industry (Ensreink, 2007). Funding agencies, such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), have implemented or are considering policies that encourage those scientists they fund to self-archive in open repositories or to publish in OA journals (“Funding Agencies Toughen Stance on Open Access,” 2007).

A battle between OA proponents and the publishing industry is escalating. The Association of American Publishers recently hired a public relations consultant, who is famous for using “media messaging” to shape the climate change debate, to assist it in shaping the debate on OA (Giles, 2007). On the other hand, many publishers are supporting OA in one form or another and are experimenting with a variety of business models to respond proactively. Some publishers have hybrid programs that give authors the option of paying to make their articles freely accessible. Others are altering subscription models to give free access to older journal content (Suber, 2007). This multifaceted and contentious issue will likely continue to get coverage in the professional literature over the next several years (Albert, 2006)....