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What we need now are transformative approaches, which begin with the recognition that the scholarly communication crisis is not a library problem, and is not limited to journal price inflation. The scholarly communication system belongs to the higher education community, a community facing unprecedented budget crises at the same time that growing faculties and student bodies are increasing the demand for scholarly information. Campus administrators have a strong leadership role as higher education players and partners explore options, experiment with new publishing alternatives, and craft new campus policies.
There are a number of promising strategies that merit consideration.
- Open Access Publishing
- Open access in this context refers to providing free access on the public Internet to works that are created with no expectation of direct monetary return. Most scholarly journal articles fit this definition.
- Author consent is a necessary condition. Open access does not include materials that authors typically expect to make money on like textbooks, most monographs, music, multimedia, etc.
- Open access is intended to be free for readers, not for producers, although costs for digital publishing will probably be lower overall than for print publications. One alternative funding model is to recover the costs of publication up front, generally through author charges. These charges could be paid from grants (publication is a natural conclusion to the research process); funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of traditional subscription journals; or endowments set up by discipline or institution. Production costs can also be offset by the sale of add-ons and enhanced services.
- Open access does not mean that peer review is bypassed. Peer review is medium-independent, as necessary for online journals as for print journals. It can be carried out in cost efficient ways with new supporting software and technologies.
- Open access publishing probably has the potential for greatest impact in the scientific, technical, and medical fields where journals prices have increased the most and where a significant amount of research is government sponsored.
- Examples of open access journal publishing using the model of author charges include the Public Library of Science (PloS) and BioMed Central.
- Author Self-archiving and Institutional and Disciplinary Repositories
- Online digital archives are another way for scholars to enjoy rapid, free worldwide dissemination of their works. These archives, or repositories, can include peer-reviewed materials as well as preprints, data sets, research reports and other materials not subjected to peer review before deposit.
- Institutional repositories such as MIT’s DSpace “capture, store, index, preserve, and redistribute the intellectual output of a university’s research faculty in digital formats.” A multiple institution community of colleges and universities could also employ such a repository.
- Disciplinary repositories, such as arXiv (physics, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computer science, quantitative biology) perform these same services for scholars within particular disciplines or groups of disciplines.
- Recent years have seen the development of several powerful sophisticated software systems for the implementation and management of repositories. A number of these systems are available free through open source licenses.
- The recent development of new standards and protocols such as the Open Archives Initiative will provide interoperability, allowing scholars to search across repositories and create “virtual archives” by harvesting metadata (document descriptions) from a variety of places.
- In 2002 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched DSpace, an institutional repository (IR) intended to capture MIT's entire intellectual output in a stable electronic archive. The ultimate goal is to create a seamless worldwide network, where multiple databases could be searched as if they were a single entity, and specialized collections built by drawing on content spread across many institutions.
Learn More
Access to the Literature: The Debate Continues
The Nature web focus began in March 2004, with an introductory article by Declan Butler. Between March and September 2004, thirty-five commissioned articles discuss the pros and cons of open access from a variety of viewpoints. This was a lively forum, and the articles are well worth reading. All content is available free.
Kristin Antelman, "Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact?" College and Research Libraries 65, no.5 (September 2004):372-382.
Antelman's study examined articles in four disciplines at differing stages of adopting open access. She used citations in the ISI Web of Science database to measure the impact of articles made freely available. The finding is that freely available articles did have greater research impact, and this held true across the four disciplines studied.
Lynch, Clifford A. "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no.226 (February 2003):1-7.
Mark Ware, "Institutional Repositories and Scholarly Publishing" Learned Publishing 17 (2004):115-124.
This article provides good information on the background and recent developments with institutional repositories and explores the impact that repositories may have on scholarly communication.
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