Open Access News

While the issue of journal pricing was without a doubt the wake-up call that brought many of us to the table, it has been critically important for us to try to understand the broader context in which these pricing trends are occurring, as well as the wider consequences. By acknowledging that we’ve got adjustments to make on a system-wide level, I think that the stakes have become higher, but I do think that the potential benefits are well worth the risks. It’s been particularly notable to me to see the discussion of access to scholarly scientific research results gain such traction as a public policy issue, not only in the U.S., but worldwide (with the PubMed Central and Research Councils UK initiatives, among others)....The way that researchers interact with their data has always driven scholarly communication. The question of how to enable the widest possible use and, especially, re-use of data is, to me, one of the most exciting issues currently on the table....[T]he Open Access campaign has been arguably the most visible of SPARC’s education campaigns, and is certainly our most active current drive. This campaign is specifically designed to promote the awareness and adoption of Open Access models, and does this through a variety of different avenues. SPARC created a rich Web-based resource articulating the potential benefits of Open Access, and followed that up with a widely-distributed brochure targeted towards educating faculty — to date, nearly 20,000 of these brochures have been distributed (by request) to various universities. We’ve produced and published a two-part business planning guide for running Open Access journals, and coordinated and run workshops and forums on this topic. Additionally, SPARC became the publisher of the very popular Free Online Scholarship Newsletter, created and [written] by Peter Suber [now called the SPARC Open Access Newsletter]. It’s an incredibly vibrant program....The “Create Change” campaign, which was driven in close collaboration with the Association of Research Libraries, has had an impressive reach. Over the past 4 years, Julia Blixrud, SPARC’s Assistant Director for Public Programs, has given invited presentations related to this campaign on dozens of university campuses, not only in the U.S., but worldwide. We’ve also seen more than 50,000 supporting brochures be requested by campuses for distribution to faculty members....While advocacy has always been one of SPARC’s major strategic activities, this program area really gained national and international attention with SPARC’s focus on Open Access....SPARC has been outspoken on policies that pertain to public access to federally funded research results, in particular on the recent NIH Public Access Policy. The focus on public access to federally funded research led SPARC to spearhead the formation of an unprecedented alliance of leading library groups, public interest organizations and patient’s advocacy groups, the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. This group quickly coalesced into a growing voice in the Open Access movement, calling for greater access to taxpayerfunded research to help drive the return on investment of public funds....I often hear the concern that small, society publishers who have traditionally been “good citizen” players in the scholarly communications arena are among those at greatest risk should funding agencies mandate a move to Open Access. As someone who has spent the majority of my career working to support scholarly societies, I am not unsympathetic to that concern. I believe that SPARC is uniquely positioned to leverage its education and outreach programs to focus on identifying and implementing market-based initiatives that can help create the kind of market conditions in which scholarly society (and other non-profit publishing organizations) can continue to play a vital role....[W]henever I’m part of a discussion about the economics of the movement, the first thing I usually hear is “there is no proven Open Access business model,” and the second thing I usually hear is a claim that any Open Access model is likely to cause economic harm to some subset of the scholarly communications community. While I agree that much more work needs to be done to create viable, market tested models, I think these kinds of statements only look at half of the issue — the potential costs of Open Access. I would like to see us focus our energies on the other side of that equation — the potential benefits of an Open Access model. I think it will be important for us to find a way to examine, and to try and quantify what the potential return on investment is that we, as a society, can realize by making the results of scholarly and scientific research openly accessible. I think that generating some data on this side of the equation would be a very enlightening and important exercise....I think institutional repositories are potentially rich breeding grounds for new kinds of scholarly communication activities. A trick will be for the community to throw out conventional thinking when considering how to populate them.