We all know that the Harvard University Faculty of Arts & Sciences (FAS) passed a pioneering Open Access (OA) mandate this February, but a lot of us didn’t know that the University of California (UC) almost got there first. UC’s near miss was discussed by representatives at a packed SPARC Forum at the American Library Association annual conference yesterday in Anaheim. “I’m thrilled and envious about Harvard,” moderator John Ober of the California Digital Library told the audience, noting that UC’s draft policy (details) never passed. “We hit a long fly ball to the warning track, but Harvard hit a home run....
Harvard computer science professor Stuart Shieber, now director of Harvard’s new Office for Scholarly Communication, first explained some background for Harvard’s policy. While a spur was “the unsustainability of journal price increases,” he said he talked about costs “always with great trepidation,” because, at heart, the issue is not costs but “the underlying systemic problems [that] have led to a reduction in access.” While commercial journals cost six times the price per page compared to OA journals, he said, there’s no proof commercial journals are six times better; in fact, the cost per citation is 16 times higher for commercial journals. “There must be some underlying market dysfunction,” he said.
Catherine Candee, executive director, Strategic Publishing and Broadcast Initiatives, from the office of the UC’s president, said that OA was “one of the best tools we’ve got” [for building] “a sustainable publishing and communication system,” but getting there isn’t easy. She said UC’s OA push began with several spurs. Some difficult negotiations in 2004 with STM publisher Elsevier helped faculty “wake up to the fact we were spending an arm and a leg.” A faculty survey from scholarly communication office led to the conclusion that the tenure and promotion system impedes changes in faculty behavior....
So the UC Senate Committee on Scholarly Communication formed, aiming to develop an OA policy. In 2006, the Academic Senate endorsed a proposal for a Scholarly Work Copyright Policy, which was essentially OA. In January 2007, she said, the provost requested Senate and administrative review of policy, involving all ten campuses. However, by July 2007, concerns over implementation overwhelmed support for the policy’s goals and intent, she said, and the policy was sent back to the provost.
Now UC faculty members, librarians, and administrators are consulting over a new version, she said. “There was a lot of inspiration from Harvard’s action,” she said. “If only we’d done something so elegantly simple…. There continues to be discussion on the local level, local committees trying to get their Senates to take it off, but system-wide, the discussion is really postponed ‘til the fall.”
UC should have kept the policy simple, Ober said, given that there were three different opt-out scenarios: “We were trying in some senses to encourage compliance by making it very difficult to opt out, which was probably the wrong way to go.” ...
[Y]esterday a representative of Harvard Medical School said, “I think we’re going to be the next school to go for OA."
And how many people so far are opting out. “We don’t even know yet,” Shieber said.
Comment. For background, see my blog posts on the UC's draft OA policy from January 2006 and February 2007. (From my January 2006 comment: "If I were at the U of California, I'd send supportive comments immediately to both the Academic Council and the Special Committee on Scholarly Communication. I might recommend a simplification of the policy....) For a recap of the major steps and links, see my postscript on the California policy at the end of my March 2008 article on the Harvard policy.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
