A new movement in academic publishing is gaining steam, and Penn is right in the thick of it.
Open access, the idea that publicly funded research should be publicly available, has seen increasing success since the 2004 launch, with Penn support, of the Public Library of Science.
The oldest of the public-access journals, PLoS Biology, "has the highest citation ranking in biology ... essentially twice as high as the next journal," said Linda Rosenstein, the Biomedical Library's associate director for information resources.
Penn has been involved from the beginning. In 2001, 34 Penn researchers signed a PLoS Open Letter calling for unrestricted access to scientific journal articles. Penn's library has been an institutional member of the public library almost since its inception.
Penn expects long-term financial benefits from aiding the library.
Traditional journal publishing essentially "is taking money out of the pockets of undergraduates in order to fund the research in the university," said Legal Studies and Business Ethics professor Dan Hunter....According to Hunter, open access can break that cycle [of rising journal prices]. He said that academics "not only provide all the content, we provide all the editorial function, and we also are the people that are buying the journals."
Calling the public library membership "an investment in an initiative" which may slow the annual price increases seen in traditional journals, the library's Director of Public Services Sandra Kerbel is "pleased that ... this experiment has worked so well."...Penn authors...receive a 50 percent discount [on PLoS processing fees] because Penn's library system pays $5,500 per year for membership.
The School of Engineering and Applied Science's head librarian Mary Steiner anticipated that, as the library adds new journals, "we'll only get more bang for our buck."
That so-called "bang" comes not only financially, but in spreading Penn research more widely. According to Kerbel, the public library "really does disseminate Penn's research."
(PS: Just one correction. PLoS Biology is probably the best-known and most influential OA journal, but it's far from the oldest.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/24/2006 11:22:00 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.
