[Insight-developers] OPEN ACCESS: Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT and UC Berkeley: Announce Joint Support for, Open-Access Publication

[Luis Ibanez]

http://hul.harvard.edu/news/2009_0914_compact.html

<quote>

Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
the University of California, Berkeley Announce Joint Support for
Open-Access Publication; Additional Research Institutions Invited to
Join the Five-Member Compact


September 14, 2009—Five of the nation's premier institutions of higher
learning—Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley—today announced
their joint commitment to a compact for open-access publication.

Open-access scholarly journals have arisen as an alternative to
traditional publications that are founded on subscription and/or
licensing fees. Open-access journals make their articles available
freely to anyone, while providing the same services common to all
scholarly journals, such as management of the peer-review process,
filtering, production, and distribution.

According to Thomas C. Leonard, university librarian at UC Berkeley,
"Publishers and researchers know that it has never been easier to share
the best work they produce with the world. But they also know that their
traditional business model is creating new walls around discoveries.
Universities can really help take down these walls and the open-access
compact is a highly significant tool for the job."

The economic downturn underscores the significance of open-access
publications. With library resources strained by budget cuts,
subscription and licensing fees for journals have come under increasing
scrutiny, and alternative means for providing access to vital
intellectual content are identified. Open-access journals provide a
natural alternative.

As Dartmouth Provost Barry P. Scherr sees it, "Supporting open-access
publishing is an important step in increasing readership of Dartmouth
research and, ultimately, the impact of our research on the world."

Since open-access journals do not charge subscription or other access
fees, they must cover their operating expenses through other sources,
including subventions, in-kind support, or, in a sizable minority of
cases, processing fees paid by or on behalf of authors for submission to
or publication in the journal. While academic research institutions
support traditional journals by paying their subscription fees, no
analogous means of support has existed to underwrite the growing roster
of fee-based open-access journals.

Stuart Shieber, Harvard's James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch
Professor of Computer Science and Director of the University's Office
for Scholarly Communication, is the author of the five-member compact.
According to Shieber, "Universities and funding agencies ought to
provide equitable support for open-access publishing by subsidizing the
processing fees that faculty incur when contributing to open-access
publications. Right now, these fees are relatively rare. But if the
research community supports open-access publishing and it gains in
importance as we believe that it will, those fees could aggregate
substantially over time. The compact ensures that support is available
to eliminate these processing fees as a disincentive to open-access
publishing."

The compact supports equity of the business models by committing each
university to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for
underwriting reasonable publication fees for open-access journal
articles written by its faculty for which other institutions would not
be expected to provide funds.

Additional universities are encouraged to visit the compact web site and
sign on.

Cornell Provost Kent Fuchs offers his perspective on participating in
the compact. "As part of its social commitment as a research
university," Fuchs says, "Cornell strives to ensure that scholarly
research results are as widely available as possible. The Compact for
Open-Access Publishing Equity could increase access to scholarly
literature while at the same time ensuring that the valuable services
that publishers provide are supported."

A full account of the motivation for the compact can be found in the
article "Equity for Open-Access Journal Publishing," published in the
open-access journal Public Library of Science Biology.

"Supporting OA journals is an investment in a superior system of
scholarly communication," states Peter Suber of the Scholarly Publishing
and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) in Washington, DC, and a fellow
of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center and Harvard University's Office
for Scholarly Communication. "Before this compact, a number of funding
agencies and universities were willing to pay OA journal processing fees
on behalf of their grantees and faculty. It's significant that five
major universities recognize the need to join the effort, extend fee
subsidies to a wider range of publishing scholars, enlist other
institutions, and start to catch up with their long practice of
supporting traditional—or non-OA—journals."

Summing up the compact, MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif observes, "The
dissemination of research findings to the public is not merely the right
of research universities: it is their obligation. Open-access publishing
promises to put more research in more hands and in more places around
the world. This is a good enough reason for universities to embrace the
guiding principles of this compact."

For more details, read the Library Notes interview with Stuart Shieber.
http://publications.hul.harvard.edu/ln_1351/shieber.html

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For more information, contact:

* Cornell—John M. Saylor, 607.255.4134
* Dartmouth—Elizabeth E. Kirk, 603.646.9929
* Harvard—Peter Kosewski, 617.495.7793, or Josh Poupore, 617.495.1585
* MIT—Patti Richards, 617.253.2700
* UC Berkeley—Thomas Leonard, 510.642.3773