This month, employees and students at the University of Oslo will elect a new chancellor. It is regarded as an important election, with five different candidates. Norwegian universities are experiencing a period of reform and rapid change. Many are concerned about academic freedom, and complain about commercialization. So you would expect at least one candidate to embrace ideas [about open access] such as those Willinsky presents in [a recent essay in First Monday]? You would be wrong. Not one of the five candidates even mentions the words open access or scientific publishing in their manifests (available in Norwegian). You are surprised? You shouldn't be. University people often prefer to be invisible and unlinked. They will defend "academic freedom", but not by making their texts available to the public (who essentially is their employer, as these universities are state funded). So they become The Block Access Movement. (I also think some of them are confusing open access to scientific articles with the general book market, which is something else altogether. The Open Access movement isn't about killing off book publishing.)...Last point: There are institutional open archives both at the University of Oslo and Bergen now. Most of the material you'll find there are master theses and doctoral dissertations - because they now force students to publish there. I fear the professors will have to be forced, too. Unless they discover what the rest of the world is starting to find out: That publishing in open access journals gives greater research impact.
(PS: OA archiving increases citation impact as much as publishing in OA journals. For the collected evidence that OA in any form increases citation impact, see Steve Hitchcock's bibliography of the studies.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/19/2005 09:33:00 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.
