Faculty members at Stanford University’s school of education have voted to make scholarly articles available to the public for free, a policy change that the university says makes Stanford’s education school the first such school in the nation to join the growing “open access” movement in academia.
“We think it’s a huge gain in terms of public access, professional access, policymaker access, and lawmaker access,” said John M. Willinsky, the education professor who proposed the idea to his colleagues at the California university....
“We think [university OA mandates] will become commonplace before too long,” said Mr. Willinsky, who has been active for years in efforts to create software and other tools to support the “open access” movement....
Under Stanford’s new policy, only the author’s final, peer-reviewed copy of the article would be posted online —in some cases, potentially months before the printed version becomes available....
By early fall, the education school plans to have a Web site in place where the articles will be posted and archived in a searchable database. With approximately 50 scholars on Stanford’s education school faculty, the site could accumulate as many as 100 articles a year, by Mr. Willinsky’s estimate.
Publishers, however, would retain the rights to the published version of the articles....
Mr. Willinsky said the policy also includes a waiver so that nontenured faculty, who face the most pressure to “publish or perish,” could ask to opt out of posting their articles online if a potential publisher insists on exclusive publishing rights....
“I think it’s important for Harvard and Stanford to do this, to use our weight to take the stand and give publishers pause before saying, ‘We’re not accepting any articles from Harvard or Stanford,’ ” Mr. Willinsky said....
PS: Good article until the last two paragraphs (omitted here). The BOAI is from Budapest, not Bulgaria, and FRPAA has not yet been adopted.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/21/2008 11:54:00 AM.
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.
