You've mentioned the 'Open Access' movement as one current trend about which you'd especially like to get input from the Skidmore community. How would you describe the movement and what challenges and opportunities does it pose to academic libraries?
In the 1980s, college administrators expressed concern that they were buying back the scholarly output of their faculty --- output they had already paid for with salaries, infrastructure, and staff. Librarians, faced with a 215 percent price increase in journals from 1986 through 2001, were forced to begin cancelling subscriptions. This created a groundswell of interest in the concept of Open Access, a movement to place peer reviewed scholarly literature on the Internet, making it available without cost and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. In 2007 the Senate Appropriations Committee directed the NIH to require that its funded research be made publically available on the Internet within 12 months of publication. The movement gained further momentum last February when the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to give the University a worldwide license to make each faculty member's scholarly articles available in a central database administered by the Harvard University Library.
Would you like to see the Skidmore faculty take a similar move as the Harvard faculty? What would this mean for Skidmore?
I would be thrilled if Skidmore faculty voted unanimously to support the Open Access movement by agreeing to submit their research to an Institutional Repository. Of course, we'd have to figure out the mechanism for developing and maintaining an Institutional Repository but the gesture would be very meaningful. If faculty everywhere did that, an extraordinary quantity of high quality research could be shared across the world. As Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library, asserted in his opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson before the Harvard University FAS vote: "In place of a closed, privileged, and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn. . . . " ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/07/2009 03:05:00 PM.
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.
