Jonathan Eisen at The Tree of Life writes
If you need any more incentive to publish a paper in an Open Access manner if you have a choice – here is one. If you publish in a closed access journal of some kind, it is likely fewer and fewer colleagues will be able to get your paper as libraries are hurting big time and will be canceling a lot of subscriptions.
He’s absolutely right.[1] Eisen refers to a statement from his own university’s library (UC Davis), describing a major review and cancellation process. Charles Bailey has compiled public statements from seven ARL libraries (Cornell, Emory, MIT, UCLA, UTennessee, UWashington, Yale) about substantial cuts to their budgets. My own university will be experiencing substantial collections budget cuts in addition to major layoffs following on from the Harvard endowment drop of 30%. The Harvard libraries are not being spared.
The ARL has issued an open statement to publishers about the situation on behalf of their membership, 123 premier academic libraries in North America. They note that in addition to 2009 cancellations, “Most member libraries are preparing cancellations of ongoing commitments for 2010.”
Now more than ever, academic authors need to take responsibility for making sure that people can read what they write. Here’s a simple two-step process.
- Retain distribution rights for your articles by choosing a journal that provides for this or amending your copyright agreement with the journal (but don’t fall into the “don’t ask, don’t tell” trap).
- Place your articles in an open access repository.
As budgets get cut and cancellations mount, fewer and fewer people will be able to read (and benefit from and appreciate and cite) your articles unless you make them accessible.
[1]Except for the implication that your only recourse is an open-access journal. In addition to that route, you can also publish in a traditional subscription-based closed-access journal, so long as it allows, or you negotiate rights for, your distribution of the article. Most journals do allow this kind of self-archiving distribution.
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University open-access policies as mandates
June 30th, 2009
“You can always tell a Harvard man…
but you can’t tell him much.”
— Source unknown
In the abecedary Harvard A to Z, in the entry under “Deans”, the story is told that “a president of the University of Virginia once received a letter requesting a university speaker for an alumni club meeting. To the club’s request that he not designate anyone lower than a dean, the president is alleged to have replied that there was no one lower than a dean.”
Why do deans get no respect? The reason, of course, is that the deanship is by reputation the quintessential position of responsibility without authority. You are in charge of a faculty who do what they will, not what you would have them. The phenomenon is sometimes referred to as “academic freedom”.
I bring this up in the context of questions about “open-access mandates”.
Institute of Education Sciences has an open access policy
June 24th, 2009
I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere, but it seems that the Institute of Education Sciences in the Department of Education is now requiring its funded research be made openly available through the ERIC repository. The policy looks analogous to that of the NIH. The pertinent clause from the current IES Request for Applications is:
Recipients of awards are expected to publish or otherwise make publicly available the results of the work supported through this program. Institute-funded investigators should submit final, peer-reviewed manuscripts resulting from research supported in whole or in part by the Institute to the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC, http://eric.ed.gov) upon acceptance for publication. An author’s final manuscript is defined as the final version accepted for journal publication, and includes all graphics and supplemental materials that are associated with the article. The Institute will make the manuscript available to the public through ERIC no later than 12 months after the official date of publication. Institutions and investigators are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning submitted articles fully comply with this requirement.
Thanks to John Collins of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education for bringing this to my attention.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” rights retention for scholarly articles
June 18th, 2009
A strange social contract has arisen in the scholarly publishing field, a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to online distribution of articles by authors. Publishers officially forbid online distribution, authors do it anyway without telling the publishers, and publishers don’t ask them to stop even though it violates contractual obligations. What happens when you refuse to play that game? Read on.
The Harvard Graduate School of Education has just released its official announcement of their June 1 enactment of an open-access policy, following the approach of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Law School, and Kennedy School of Government, as well as the Stanford University School of Education.
Four down, six(ish) to go.
An economic solution to reviewing load
June 15th, 2009
Hal Daume at the NLP blog bemoans the fact that “there is too much to review and too much garbage among it” and wonders “whether it’s possible to cut down on the sheer volume of reviewing”.
The argument for gold OA support
June 11th, 2009
Are green and gold open access independent of each other? In particular, is worry about gold OA a waste of time, and are expenditures on it a waste of money? Stevan Harnad has brought up this issue in response to a recent talk I gave at Cal Tech, and in particular my remarks about a potential “open access compact”. I will take this opportunity to explain why I think that the answer to both questions is “no”.
Are the Harvard open-access policies unfair to publishers?
June 9th, 2009
Recently, the representative of a major scientific journal publisher expressed to me the sentiment that the position that Harvard faculty have taken through our open-access policies — setting the default for rights retention to retain rights by default rather than to eschew rights by default — is in some sense unfair to subscription-based journals that require embargoes, that we are favoring one scholarly publishing business model over another and setting up an unlevel playing field.
The death of scholarly journals?
June 8th, 2009
One of the frequent worries I hear expressed about open-access policies such as the ones at Harvard is that they will lead to the death of journals (or of scholarly societies, or of peer review). When we first began addressing Harvard faculty on these issues, I heard this worry expressed so frequently that I wrote up my standard reply to save myself time in answering it. I supply that reply in this entry. There is little original in the argument. It has been made in various forms in various places in writings about open access, most notably and comprehensively by Peter Suber here . But it may be useful to see it in this distilled form.
In the popular conception, open-access journals generate revenue by charging publication fees. The popular conception turns out to be false. Various studies have explored the extent to which OA journals charge publication fees. The results have been counterintuitive to many, indicating that far fewer OA journals charge publication fees than one might have thought. You can verify this yourself using some software I provide in this post.