The future of academic research is in peril. University budgets are decreasing while the cost of academic journals is skyrocketing. As a result, universities are unable to purchase vital journal subscriptions that help boost the quality and success of new academic research. Fortunately, new and innovative solutions are growing in popularity and have the potential to change the future of academic communication....Faculty should try to publish their work in journals that will reach a large audience and are low cost. When that is not possible, faculty should try to retain key rights to their works when negotiating with high cost publishers. Such rights allow faculty to distribute their research to a broader audience and submit it to an institutional repository....When deciding tenure, university administrations should consider all research published by a faculty member including high-quality, low-cost and/or open access journals....Faculty should try to publish in open access journals....Administrators and librarians should create permanent standing archives in which researchers at the institution can deposit their work. The university system maintains the archive and makes available the research stored within it over the Internet. This guarantees free permanent access to the research produced by that university to the university itself, other university systems and the public....The creation of central, standing archives for publicly funded research allow free access to valuable information, benefiting universities, government agencies, and the general public. Individual professors, universities and organizations dedicated to increasing access to research have successfully made initial steps towards solving this problem by implementing one or more of the strategies described here, but more rigorous change is needed in order to balance the public’s need for advanced research and the publishers’ profits.
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.
