Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // [email protected]
http://presentations.kfitz.info/oa.html
Note: I've been asked to give a brief overview of the issues surrounding open access publishing, and want to start by noting that what I'm presenting here is highly abbreviated; there's a lot of excellent scholarly work that digs much further into these issues, including Peter Suber's Open Access, and Martin Eve's Open Access and the Humanities, both of which I highly recommend.
Note: The open access movement is generally described as coalescing around three key statement that appeared in fairly rapid succession, each of which sought to define the future of open scholarship.
By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Note: The first of these, the Budapest declaration, which was originally released in 2002, established the first of the formal definitions. (READ SLIDE)
Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
Note: The declaration included an extremely idealistic statement of the authoring group's goals: (READ SLIDE).
- self-archiving ("green")
- open-access journals ("gold")
Note: The declaration further went on to note that there were two strategies that would help scholarly communication achieve these goals:
- self-archiving, or what became known as the "green" road to open access, in which researchers share work in open archives, and preferably archives that can be made interoperable; and
- open-access journals, or what became known as the "gold" road to open access, in which work is made open by the publisher at the point of publication.
Note: This is where things started to get messy, however, as the gold-ness of gold led many to believe that there was a hierarchy being declared between green and gold, which several of the original signatories tried unsuccessfully to refute. Beyond this, however, was a bit of a subversion in the the original reason that the open access movement came together: around the unsustainable economics of scholarly publishing. Major corporate publishers had worked to consolidate their ownership over top-tier publications in ways that permitted them to charge research libraries exorbitant subscription fees, thus making access to scholarship dependent on access to an institution with the ability to pay -- and of course thus charging institutions to purchase access to the work done by their own faculty members.
Note: And even more, limiting access to the products of research undermines the reason we do the work: to develop new knowledge and share it with the world so that more such knowledge can be built upon it. By publishing in venues that very few can access, we limit the impact of that work -- and so open access advocates pushed for new modes of publishing that could increase the impact of research by providing unfettered access to everyone.
Note: However, because of the emphasis on the consumption end of "access," the same publishers that had been keeping research limited to those institutions that could afford to pay realized that if they shifted their business model such that researchers or their institutions paid to publish, they could maintain their income while making the work free to read online.
Note: But what that flipped model does, of course, is shift the scarcity from the consumer side to the producer side, creating a crisis in access for researchers without major grants or institutional support for publication fees, and ultimately leaving the economics of scholarly communication unchanged. A few major corporate publishers are still in control of the processes of scholarly communication, and are still profiting extravagantly from the work done on our campuses.
Note: Moreover, this pay-to-publish model has produced a great deal of concern among researchers about so-called "predatory journals," publications that have sprung up solely for the purpose of pulling in those author-side fees but that don't provide adequate editorial control, peer review, or scholarly impact. This concern, while real, has been a bit overblown: not all gold open access journals are predatory -- far from it -- and it's easy enough to uncover which journals are, by looking at the work they publish.
Note: There are also a lot of concerns circulating about the state of peer review in open access publishing, but honestly, there needn't be: open access is perfectly compatible with any form of peer review.
Note: However, there are a wide range of other economic models available to support open-access publishing, including grant-based support for publishers, as well as subscribe-to-open models, in which libraries maintain reasonably priced subscriptions to non-profit journal platforms in exchange for the promise that the platforms will be and remain open access. There are also a wide range of library-supported publishing programs and platforms, but the ease and the visibility of the flip of conventional journals to article processing fees has left these new options a bit underexplored.
Note: One key option that's on the horizon, however, includes rethinking the processes of publication altogether. The Coalition of Open Access Repositories has begun working on a project called Notify, which will allow researchers to deposit work -- whether manuscripts or datasets or other kinds of projects entirely -- and then alert their communities of practice that the work is ready for peer review. This will allow work to be open from the start, and allow particular subfields to determine the best means of review, accreditation, and dissemination, and it will allow the academy to maintain ownership of the platforms and processes through which the work it facilitates is made public.
(commons.msu.edu)
Note: We've been working here at MSU to expand open-access publishing opportunities, both through MSU Commons, which provides the MSU community with an open-access repository for sharing a wide variety of kinds of work, as well as through PubHub, a developing platform for open-access publishing hosted by the library.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // [email protected]
http://presentations.kfitz.info/oa.html
Note: I'd be happy to address any questions about these platforms, or about other issues related to open access.