Scholarly Communication

The Crisis in Scholarly Publishing and the Need for Change

 The current model of scholarly communication has been showing signs of a crisis for several years, and many college and university libraries feel it is time for change.   Key factors that have contributed to the challenges of the current model include increasing market share of large publishing companies, pricing models of electronic publishing, rapidly rising prices for scholarly journals, and limits on fair use and public domain information.

This has led scholars, publishers, and librarians to develop a number of alternatives to the traditional model, the subscriber-restricted journal system.   Most of these alternatives focus around the open distribution of scholarly information via the Web, and fall under the general term of “open access.”

Open Access (OA) is literature (mainly journal literature) that is available free of charge on the Internet and is also free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The move towards OA is a grass-roots response to the increasingly high cost of journals, which makes them difficult for libraries to afford and for users to access.

While access to OA articles is free, there are still costs involved. Most OA publishers use the "author pays" model, where the author of an accepted OA article pays the costs for editing and distribution. A variation of this model is an institutional membership, where the author's institution pays an annual membership fee to an OA publisher, and all authors from the institution get their payments for accepted articles either waived, or offered at a discount. In almost all cases, OA publishers make exceptions for authors who cannot afford to pay.

• Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free to all users, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.   OA removes price barriers.
• OA is compatible with copyright, peer review, revenue, print, preservation, prestige, career-advancement, indexing, and other supportive services associated with conventional scholarly literature.
• OA uses the consent of the copyright holder or the public domain.   Because OA uses copyright-holder consent, or the expiration of copyright, it does not require the abolition, reform, or infringement of copyright.
• OA focuses on literature that authors donate to the world without expectation of payment.   Royalty-free literature reduces costs for providers, and enables authors to consent to OA without losing revenue.
• OA literature is not free to produce or publish.   The emphasis here is on, free for readers, not free for producers.   OA argues that there are better ways to pay the costs of producing it than by charging readers and creating access barriers.

Latest developments in Open Access

1. The NIH Public Access Policy (signed into law January 2008 and effective April 7) specifies that all NIH funded papers must be submitted to PubMed Central, and must be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication.    PubMed Central is the NIH’s free digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed journal articles in the biomedical and life sciences.   The NIH also specifies that institutions and investigators are responsible for ensuring that any agreements concerning submitted articles comply with this policy.  

2. In February, the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted unanimously to provide the university with copies of their published articles AND permission to post them in their digital repository.   They will establish an Office of Scholarly Communications to accomplish this task.   Harvard becomes the first American university to make open access to faculty articles a default position, requiring faculty to opt out rather than opt in.   Faculty members who choose to publish in journals that will not accept the new policy can apply for a waiver.

3. More and more colleges and universities are providing their faculty with information and tools to help faculty manage their copyrights, to retain their rights, and allow others to use their work. Some of these schools include: Cornell, MIT, Dartmouth, and Columbia.

Why should Connecticut College support the Open Access Publishing model?   For the last decade, price increases from the large commercial publishers have far exceeded the increases in library budgets.   To make matters worse, online journals costs have been rising at much faster rates, and many library budgets are now driven by these increases.   Connecticut College has also been feeling the long-term effects of this trend.   In 2005, the library had to cancel a number of subscriptions.   Book expenditure rates (average expended per student) are also falling behind those of our peers.

Open Access Providers Connecticut College supports:

BioMed Central

BioOne

Public Library of Science (PLoS)

SPARC

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP)

             The Information Services Committee of the faculty would like to invite the Connecticut College scholarly community to support the Open Access initiative.   If you wish to learn more about these issues, please contact your library liaison.

Statement of Support

[ Approved by the IS Committee on February 15, 2005.]

            The Connecticut College Faculty supports the library’s efforts to maintain and enhance the quality of its collections for teaching and research.   Recognizing the special challenges presented by the traditional system of scholarly communication, the Faculty supports the library’s efforts to maintain the quality of the collections at fair and reasonable costs.   The faculty resolves to call upon its tenured members to give serious and careful consideration to alternative publishing models, such as Open Access Publishing, a model that promotes free and immediate access to original research.   The Library calls upon the college community to join in actively supporting Open Access initiatives that maintain peer review, increase access, and assure preservation of the scholarly record at a reasonable cost.

More Information on the Issue

Berlin Declaration

Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing

Budapest Open Acess Initiative

NIH Policy

Open Access News

ACRL Scholarly Communication

Scholarly Communication Toolkit

Actions in Support of Open Access

See the complete list of University actions for open access or against high journal prices at: Lists Related to the Open Access Movement (Peter Suber).

Selected Publishers and Open Access Providers

BioMed Central – the Open Access Publisher.

BioOne

Public Library of Science

Public Library of Science Biology

Public Library of Science Medicine

PubMed Central

Organizations and Directories

Create Change

Directory of Open Access Journals

Issues in Scholarly Communication at Cornell University

Issues in Scholarly Communication at Oberlin College

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)