Open Access News

Ray English, the Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries at Oberlin College, presented the second annual Couper Phi Beta Kappa Library Lecture. English spoke about the need for fundamental reform in the system of scholarly communication, and advocated a move toward open access publishing....

The traditional system of scholarly communication is not sustainable and is in need of fundamental transformation, English said. He outlined several major problems he sees with the traditional system in his talk: the serials crisis, the monograph crisis, and the permissions crisis. The fundamental problem resulting from all of these crises is a lack of access, both for those readers who want to consume scholarly work and those scholars who want to share their research with others. It’s paradoxical, English said, that in today’s technological environment, which can provide us with so much information so easily, access to scholarly information is actually declining.

English spoke first about the serials crisis. Scholarly journals have been increasing in price about 8% annually, while libraries’ budgets for serials are staying flat or increasing at a much lower rate. This gap is the origin of many of our problems, English said, and the current system makes it likely that the gap will only get larger. Most of the price increases come from the journals that are printed by corporate publishing companies, English said, as opposed to not-for-profit journals published by professional societies and university presses. These more expensive, for-profit journals are not necessarily better, however. English shared data that shows that commercial journals actually have a much higher price per citation of their articles in other scholarly work, suggesting that they have less academic impact for the money. Increasing consolidated corporate control of journals means that the price increases are likely to continue, he said....

The last problem area English addressed in his talk is the “permissions crisis,” a phrase coined by Peter Suber, an advocate for open access to scholarship. Suber uses the term to describe the legal and technological barriers which limit academics access to scholarly writings. English gave the example of professors who are unable to use copies of their own articles in their classes because of copyright and licensing issues....

Therefore, the system of scholarly communication is in need of radical transformation. One popular strategy for change is the move towards open access, the free, unrestricted online access to academic literature. English called this strategy the most promising to date. Open access journals can still be peer-reviewed and of equivalent quality to traditional journals. While the logistics and business models of open access journals still have to be worked out, English said that open access has the benefits of increasing readership, research impact, scientific progress, and the growth of knowledge....