In his closing keynote address at the 2008 SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting, in Baltimore, MD, David Shulenberger, VP of academic affairs at the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC), offered seven steps toward a brighter, digital repository future. Then, in notable aside to one of the steps, he called out the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) for working against the best interests of the academy.
Describing one of his seven steps, Shulenberger urged participants to educate campus units, “such as university presses,” to help convince them “to support, not oppose” the best interests of their faculty. He criticized AAUP and the American Chemical Society for their support of the controversial Fair Copyright in Research Works Act [a.k.a. Conyers bill], which would bar federal agencies from requiring public access in exchange for grant funding, and, he said, “make building digital repositories far more difficult....[W]e can’t afford to have those who benefit from the university environment working in ways so detrimental to it,” he asserted. “[Presses and ACS] need to understand the perspective of the community in which they live. Their organizations’ continued good health is dependent on the health of the larger academic community,” he noted, urging attendees to work with these organizations to “change such organized resistance.” ...
In 2007, there was a significant backlash among academic presses over the role AAUP’s partner organization, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), played in the PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine) campaign, the publishing communities’ PR attempt to block the NIH public access policy. James Jordan, president and director of Columbia University Press,resigned from the AAP’s Executive Council over PRISM, and Stephen Bourne, chief executive officer of Cambridge University Press, slammed the campaign as “oversimplistic and ill-judged.” ...
Shulenberger offered strong support for digital repositories, which he said was the “most effective way” to get scholarly information to the public that needs it. “With digital repositories in place, the limitations on distribution imposed by scholarly journals, proximity of the viewer, etc., no longer have to constitute a bar to access,” he noted. He offered participants seven steps to help get to that next level:
Make sure that there is a digital repository available for your university’s faculty.
Work with administrators to acknowledge the benefits of broadening distribution, and that your university will reap those benefits by using the repository.
Initiate discussions involving administration and faculty about current practices and intellectual property policies—in other words, “emulate Harvard.”
Support efforts to spread public access policies like those of NIH to all federal funding agencies and foundations.
Work with e campus units, (such as university presses), to support, not oppose, the best interests of their faculty.
Work with departments and faculty to develop habits of depositing in the repository.
Work with PR units so that the public, donors, and legislators know to look to your institutional repository to find reliable information....
[H]e also suggested that promoting the digital repository could be a “means to entice additional funding” from their states or donors. “The digital repository can be the equivalent of the unchaining of the bibles. Real access can be had from every kitchen table.”
Comment. The Conyers bill would directly overturn the NIH policy and block similar policies at every federal agency. Kudos to Shulenberger for criticizing the AAUP and ACS for supporting the bill. Also see my own criticism of the AAUP for supporting the bill: 1, 2, 3, 4. Note items 2 and 4 in particular. The AAUP says it supports the Conyers bill without opposing the NIH policy. But it has not qualified its endorsement of the bill in order to spare the policy, criticized the breadth of the bill or its effect on the policy, or endorsed the 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.
