Links

Projeto Ciência Livre - (www.ciencialivre.org). Projeto que tem como objetivo explorar as possibilidades de aplicação do modelo de produção dos softwares livres à produção e desenvolvimento de trabalhos e artigos científicos, disponibilizados sob os termos e condições das licenças do projeto Creative Commons.

Science Commons - (www.sciencecommons.org) Projeto exploratório que visa aplicar a filosofia e atividades do Creative Commons à Ciência.

Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y el Caribe (Red ALyC) - (http://redalyc.uaemex.mx). Projeto de acadêmicos da UNAM (México) que visa constituir um portal de livre e irrestrito acesso a revistas científicas latino-americanas.

Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org). Tem como objetivo "incrementar a visibilidade e a facilidade de uso das publicações acadêmicas e científicas através da promoção de sua difusão e impacto". Surgiu a partir da First Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication, realizada em 2002.

ICAAP.org - Consórcio Internacional para o Avanço das Publicações Acadêmicas (www.icaap.org). Portal que defende o acesso livre a publicações acadêmicas. Oferece uma ampla lista de publicações "livres". Dispõe também, sem custos, espaço e serviço de hospedagem para as publicações acadêmicas que queiram aderir.

DiVA - Digital Scientific Archive ou Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet no sueco (www.diva-portal.se). Desenvolvido na Universidade de Uppsala, com adesões de outras universidades. É um repositório de documentos científicos de livre acesso. Em operação plena desde 2003.

SciELO - Scientific Eletronic Library Online (www.scielo.br). Base de Dados Nacional da Área da Saúde. Possui versões em inglês e espanhol. O acesso é livre, mas não faz parte do movimento internacional Open Access. não há garantias que o acesso permanecerá livre.

Projeto Gutenberg (www.promo.net/pg). Amplo projeto que disponibiliza livros de domínio público.

Atena - Antigo diretório que reúne textos sobre filosofia, clássicos, historia, economia e literatura em geral. http://un2sg1.unige.ch/www/athena/html/athome.html

Information Access (www.informationaccess.org). Oferece acesso a publicações diversas, principalmente na área de medicina e tecnologia.

Open Archives Initiative (www.openarchives.org) Disponibiliza documentos Desenvolve e promove standards de inter-operatividade com objetivo de facilitar e eficiencia da disseminação de conteúdo. A iniciativa The Open Archives tem suas raízes no esforço de promover o acesso a arquivos digitais para aumentar a disponibilidade de comunicação acadêmica.

Os links e textos abaixo ainda serao traduzidos para o português.
A maioria deles foi compilado por Peter Suber

Lists Related toThe Open Access Movement

This file is a storeroom with as many shelves as I care to add. It's a place where I can organize sites, ideas, and some interesting patterns in the history of the open access movement. My Timeline of the Open Access Movement probably belongs here, but because of its size I've given it a page to itself. If you can add to these lists, or correct any mistakes in them, please send me an email.

Peter Suber
Last revised September 28, 2004.

www.oaister.org gives a search over all OAI archives.

"Directory of Open Access Journals" search engine, which lists over 1400 open access journals. http://www.doaj.org/

Disciplinary differences relevant to open access

  • Here I'm collecting the differences among the disciplines relevant to the realization of open access. Most economic differences among the disciplines belong on this list, but not all the relevant differences are economic. This list is intended to answer the question, "Why won't we make progress toward open access in all disciplines at the same rate?"
  • I'm retroactively looking for online sources to document some of these differences and would welcome link suggestions.
  • In no particular order.
  1. Some have superb print indices, online indices, or search engines, and some don't.
  2. Some have an established culture of preprint exchange, and some don't.
  3. The literature in some fields is pure text, perhaps with an occasional table or illustration, while in others it relies heavily on images or even multi-media presentations.
  4. In some (the sciences), journal literature is the primary literature, while in others (the humanities) journal literature only reports on the history and interpretation of the primary literature, which lies in books.
  5. In some fields, both truth and money are at stake in the results reported in scholarly literature, while in others, only truth is at stake.
  6. In some fields (some of the sciences), most published research is funded, while in others (the humanities and many sciences) very little is.
  7. In some disciplines (the sciences), the cost of research is greater than the cost of publication, while in others (the humanities), the reverse is true.
  8. In some disciplines (the sciences), the demand for articles drops off more sharply after they are published, while in others (the humanities) it declines slowly and sometimes even grows. This affects whether a journal would lose subscribers and revenue by offering open access after an embargo period of a certain length.
  9. In some fields, most journal publishers are for-profit corporations, while in other fields most are non-profit universities, libraries, or professional societies.
  10. In some fields (the humanities), nearly all publishing researchers are employed by universities, while in others (the sciences) the fraction is significantly smaller.
  11. In some fields, the sets of journal readers and journal authors are nearly identical or overlap significantly, while in others they overlap only slightly.
  12. In some fields, the need for copy editors is greater than in other fields (i.e. to compensate for language deficiencies in submissions by non-native speakers, to minimize academic obscurities for a less specialized audience, or simply to present a clearer and more professional text).
  13. In some fields, more cutting-edge research is presented first in conferences than in journals and in other fields the reverse is true.
  14. In some fields, research will be impeded if access to journal literature is not timely, while in others timeliness matters much less.
  15. In fields with higher rejection rates (social sciences and humanities), the cost of peer review per accepted paper will be higher than in fields with lower rejection rates (the natural sciences).
  16. In most fields, the author of an article is the copyright holder for everything in the article and can consent to open access for all of its contents. In other fields (e.g. art history), scholarly authors will want to include images under copyright by others, have to seek permissions, and may fail for some, fail for all, be delayed in trying, or have to pay permission fees. (Note that permission to reproduce images for open-access publication will be harder to obtain than permission for traditional publication.)
  17. In some fields, the average set of differences between submitted preprints and edited postprints is small. In others it is large. When large, the cost of publication is higher, unless all the editing is done by volunteers, and the freely archived preprint is a less adequate substitute for the postprint.
  18. In some fields (like medicine) many journals still use the Inglefinger Rule, which tends to inhibit preprint archiving. Most fields that once used the rule have stopped using it.
  19. Journals in some fields and specializations can attract advertising, in adequate or significant amounts, while journals in other fields and specializations cannot.

Discussion forums devoted to open-access issues

  • Here I'm limiting the list to discussion forums narrowly on open access. There are many forums on related issues such as digital libraries, electronic publication, and online education.
  1. American Scientist Open Access Forum (aka AmSci Forum, September98 Forum) from American Scientist. Moderated by Stevan Harnad.
  2. BOAI Forum. The forum associated with the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Moderated by Peter Suber.
  3. Economics of Open Access. Moderated by Alastair Dryburgh.
  4. Eprints Community. The forum associated with the eprints archiving software.
  5. Nature debates from Nature. Long, substantive contributions.
  6. OAI-Eprints list from the Open Archives Initiative.
  7. Open Access Now Forum from Open Access Now.
  8. PLoS Community Boards from the Public Library of Science.
  9. ScholComm from the American Library Association. On scholarly communication.
  10. SSP-L from the Society for Scholarly Publishing.
  11. SPARC-IR from SPARC. On institutional repositories.
  12. SPARC Open Access Forum (SOAF) from SPARC. Formerly called the FOS Forum. On open-access developments broadly construed, especially issues raised by the SPARC Open Access Newsletter or Open Access News blog.

Incomplete realizations of open access

  • By incomplete realizations of open access I mean steps in the right direction that do not go all the way, half-measures, compromises, or hybrid models that only partially fulfill the promise of open access. From one point of view, they count as progress and deserve support. From another point of view, they attempt to satisfy users with something less adequate and thereby delay true open access. Many journals that take these steps are experimenting and over time take further steps toward full open access.
  • I hope that friends of open access will (1) advocate full open access and do what they can to implement it, (2) encourage experimentation for those not yet willing to implement it, and (3) praise steps that make access easier and wider even if they stop short of full open access.
  1. online but not free, perhaps even expensive
  2. online, not free, but affordable
  3. free and online but only citations, abstracts, or tables of contents, not full-text
  4. free online preprints (in a preprint archive or at the author's home page) but not free online postprints
  5. free online preprints (at the journal site) from the moment of submission or acceptance, but free online postprints only some time after print publication
  6. free online special issues but not free online regular issues
  7. free online searching but not free online reading
  8. free online reading but not free copying or printing
  9. free online reading but other uses limited to "fair use" (or "fair dealing")
  10. free online reading, printing etc. but only one article at a time, hence not free or efficient crawling
  11. free and online but only for the text, not for charts, illustrations, multi-media addenda, data sets, and so on.
  12. free and online but only for the current issue, not back issues
  13. free and online but only for back issues, not the current issue
  14. free and online for all issues but only some number of months after toll-access publication
  15. free and online for all issues but only for a limited time (introductory offers)
  16. free and online but only after an article has been accepted and before it is published
  17. free and online but only for registered users, even if registration is free
  18. free and online but only for editor-selected articles from the toll-access edition or only for a supplement to the toll-access edition (this can produce true OA for the selected articles)
  19. free and online but only for author-selected and prepaid articles from the toll-access edition (this can produce true OA for the selected articles)
  20. free online access for some readers (e.g. those paying society dues, those employed by a certain institution, those living in a certain country), but not for all internet users

Institutions that support open access

  • I don't want to get into the business of listing individual institutions. But here are some clusters of institutions that support open access. This way of doing it makes the list far from complete but easier to maintain. It's a start.

Journal declarations of independence

  • By a journal declaration of independence, I mean the resignation of editors from a journal in order to launch a comparable journal with a friendlier publisher. The kinds I'm collecting for this list usually have two stages. First, an editor or group of editors resigns from the journal in order to protest its high subscription price or audience-limiting access rules. This is usually accompanied by a public statement explaining "the causes which impel them to the separation" (to quote Thomas Jefferson). Second, some of the resigning editors create a new free or affordable alternative journal to compete with the first and to embody their vision of wide access.
  • I borrow the term "declaration of independence" for this phenomenon from the SPARC project to assist journals in Declaring Independence. Of course, SPARC borrowed the term from the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
  • Chronological order.

  1. In June 1989, Editor Eddy van der Maarel and most of his editorial board resigned from Vegetatio (W. Junk, then Nijhoff, then Kluwer) in order to launch the Journal of Vegetation Science (Opulus Press and the International Association for Vegetation Science).

  2. In December 1996, Shu-Kun Lin resigned as editor of Molecules, then published by Springer-Verlag, and relaunched the journal with Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI). Springer sued to prevent Shu-Kun Lin from using the same for the MDPI journal but eventually dropped its suit.

  3. In November 1998, Michael Rosenzweig and the rest of his editorial board resigned from Evolutionary Ecology (Chapman & Hall, then International Thomson, now Kluwer), which Rosenzweig had launched in 1986, in order to create Evolutionary Ecology Research. Its birth and early survival were assisted by SPARC.

  4. In 1998 most of the editorial board of the Journal of Academic Librarianship resigned to protest the large hike in the subscription price imposed by Pergamon-Elsevier after it bought the journal from JAI Press. Several of the editors who resigned then created Portal: Libraries and the Academy at Johns Hopkins University Press.

  5. In November 1999, the entire 50 person editorial board of the Journal of Logic Programming (Elsevier) resigned and formed a new journal, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (Cambridge). Its birth and early survival were assisted by SPARC.

  6. In January 2000 (to take effect in July 2000), Henry Hagedorn resigned as editor of the Archives of Insect Biochemistry & Physiology (Wiley-Liss) in order to form the Journal of Insect Science (University of Arizona library). JIS is a free online journal with no print edition. It plans to offset the costs of online publication with author fees. Its birth and early survival were assisted by SPARC.

  7. Early in 2001, a handful of editors of Topology and Its Applications (Elsevier) resigned in order to create Algebraic and Geometric Topology (University of Warwick and International Press), a free online journal with an annual printed volume. Its birth and early survival were assisted by SPARC.

  8. Over a nine month period in 2001, forty editors of Machine Learning (Kluwer) resigned from the editorial board and published their reasons in a public letter dated October 8, 2001. One of those resigning, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, created the Journal of Machine Learning Research as a free online alternative with a quarterly print edition published by MIT Press. About two-thirds of the Machine Learning editors joined her at the new journal

  9. Elsevier has published the European Economic Review since 1969. In 1986 the European Economic Association (EEA) adopted it as its official journal. But the EEA grew increasingly unhappy with Elsevier's subscription price and its requirement that the publisher, not the association, hire the journal's editors. In 2001 the EEA started the process of declaring independence from Elsevier. In March 2003 its new official journal, the Journal of the European Economic Association, was launched by MIT Press at about one-third of the Elsevier subscription price.

  10. On July 3, 2003, The entire 40+ person editorial board Labor History (Taylor and Francis) resigned in protest over the journal's high subscription price and lack of editorial independence. The same editors then launched Labor with non-profit Duke University Press. Labor is a partner of SPARC, which assisted in the transition and launch.

  11. On August 13, 2003, the Society for the Internet in Medicine named the open-access Journal of Medical Internet Research as its new official journal, replacing the subscription-based Medical Informatics & Internet in Medicine. (This is a decision by a scholarly society, not journal editors, but I include it on the list because of the family resemblance to a true declaration of independence.)

  12. On September 22, 2003, Compositio Mathematica announced that it was leaving Kluwer to be published by the London Mathematical Society and distributed by Cambridge University Press (starting in January 2004). The journal's editor of 20+ years, Gerard van der Geer, explained in a public note that the move was triggered by a long series of unwanted Kluwer price increases. The LMS edition of the journal is not free, but priced one-third below the former price.

  13. On December 31, 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned in order to protest the high price charged by the publisher (Elsevier). On January 21, 2004, the same board then launched a new journal, Transactions on Algorithms, published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
    • [old journal] Journal of Algorithms (Elsevier)
    • [new journal] Transactions on Algorithms [no web site yet] (ACM)
    • Letter from Donald E. Knuth to fellow members of the Journal Algorithms editorial board outlining the problem, describing the open-access solution, and asking them to choose among four options.
    • Public statement by the former Journal of Algorithms editors explaining their resignation. Forthcoming in the March 2004 issue of SIGACT News.
    • Hal Gabow has the dates and some other details on his home page.
    • George Porter discusses some of the aftermath in a May 14, 2004 STLQ blog posting.

  14. On January 27, 2004, Editor in Chief Dominique Boullier and the entire editorial board of Les cahiers du numérique resigned from the journal and released an open letter explaining why. They point to CduN's high price and limited online access policy which "contradict our objectives as researchers".

Open-access archives

Open-access policy statements by learned societies and professional associations

  • Here I'm collecting policy statements on how academic authors, journals, and publishers should treat the opportunities created by the internet for free online access to research literature.
  • I'll accept statements by learned societies and professional associations in any field, from any country, in any language, whether they are favorable or unfavorable to open access. If you find statements by universities, libraries, or foundations, I'd like to see them too; I may start a separate list of them.
  • Alphabetical by organization.
  1. American Anthropological Association. AAA offers its members free online access to a vast array of resources in anthropology, including datasets, photos, videos, and the full-text contents of all AAA journals.
  2. American Physical Society. The copyright transfer agreement the APS uses with its journals, allowing authors to post articles to eprint servers. February 2001.
  3. American Psychological Association. June 1, 2001.
  4. Association for Computing Machinery. See especially 1.1, 3.1, 5.1. This 1998 policy has been updated and supplemented by current rules for preprints.
  5. Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. The model "license to publish" that it recommends for use by society journals.
  6. Florida Entomological Society. The statement of its journal, Florida Entomologist.
  7. The Geological Society. The policy that applies to all of its journals.
  8. Higher Education Funding Council for England. This excerpt of the 1996 Research Assessment Exercise is the only part relevant to open access, and the only part still on the web.
  9. ICSU-UNESCO. ICSU = International Council for Science. UNESCO = United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
  10. Institute of Physics. See paragraphs 3.1 and 3.2.
  11. International Mathematical Union. Endorsement of "open access" as a goal for all mathematical literature (May 15, 2001). The IMU has also endorsed copyright advice for mathematicians; see especially point 3.c from the Executive Summary. Also see the IMU's short version of the Hodges checklist.
  12. International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. July 2001 Report of an IUPAP working group on scholarly communication. Recommendations, not yet policy. Also see the report on a subsequent November meeting which adopted steps toward the realization of the July recommendations.
  13. Medical Library Association. October 2003 statement of policy.
  14. Russian Society of BioPsychiatry. I can't find the actual text yet and have linked to a news account of the statement.

    There must be more than this! If you know of any others, please send me an email.

    For policy statements by journal publishers, see the list at the Self-Archiving FAQ and Project SHERPA.

Tools to support online archives and journals

  • I formerly had a list of software tools to support online journals here. But I've removed it (April 2, 2002) because SPARC has created a much better one (with which I helped a bit). I retain this pointer in case external links still point to my old list.

University actions against high journal prices

  • Here I'm collecting significant university actions to protest, resist, reverse, or extricate themselves from high journal prices, inflexible bundling arrangements, or oppressive licensing terms. I'm especially interested in large-scale cancellations, new institutional policies, Faculty Senate resolutions, public statements, and recommendations to faculty, librarians, and administrators.
  • I quote substantial excerpts from public statements, when I can, because I know it is difficult to read them all separately and pull together their notable elements.
  • When I know of news stories about the university actions, I include them. But I haven't gone out of my way to hunt them down. The university actions are primary.
  • I only list each university once, and include subsequent actions and related news stories in the same entry. In the case of the University of California, since many of the separate campuses acted before the system acted, I list them separately. In the case of the four university members of the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN), I list them under the entry for the TRLN.
  • While the list so far is limited to U.S. universities, that's only because I don't know of similar actions elsewhere. I welcome additions and corrections.
  • Chronological order, starting in the fall of 2003. There are earlier actions, but they do not seem to be part of the current wave. As I learn about earlier actions, I will consider adding them.

  1. University of California at Berkeley:  Journal Prices and Scholarly Communication, memorandum to the Academic Senate Faculty from Thomas Leonard, University Librarian, and Anthony Newcomb and Elaine Tennant, co-chairs of the Academic Senate Library Committee, September 4, 2003. The memorandum contains an introduction by Robert M. Berdahl, Chancellor.
    • Summary:  The University cancelled an undisclosed number of journals. It emphasized that the problem was runaway journal prices, not the library budget: "Berkeley will continue to face this runaway serials pricing even after the present budget crisis is over." Recommendations: "Faculty need to become aware of the pricing policies of journals (including commercial electronic journals) in their fields....Submit papers to quality journals that have reasonable pricing practices. Modify any contract you sign with a commercial publisher to ensure that you retain the rights to use your work as you see fit, including posting it to a public archive. Consider declining offers to review for unreasonably expensive journals and to serve on their editorial boards....Make changes in scholarly communication a recurring topic at departmental meetings. Consider taking over the publication and distribution of research within your scholarly community. This has already begun at Berkeley, particularly with our colleagues in the Sciences and the Social Sciences....Encourage your professional associations to maintain reasonable prices for scholarship and to establish access terms that are friendly to faculty and other users....The appearance of unconscionable pricing for academic journals...is a problem that has come upon the academy suddenly and has now reached crisis proportions. We will have no one to blame but ourselves if we do not begin to address it at once."
    • On September 15, 2003, the Berkeley Graduate Student Assembly released a public statement on the pricing crisis and journal cancellations. It cites the California Digital Library and Project Euclid as good examples of "alternate publication models", but adds that they cannot suffice. "The success of alternate models requires awareness on the part of faculty and students of the problems inherent in the current model. The Graduate Assembly calls on faculty, administrators, and graduate students to support a significant culture change in academia; we must create an environment in which faculty and students can choose to publish their cutting-edge research outside the standard academic publishing industry."
    • The Berkeley library set up a web site with background information on the problem and more detail on the Berkeley response. The site includes a useful FAQ.

  2. University of California at Santa Cruz:  Resolution on ties with Elsevier Journals, adopted by the Committee on the Library and sent to the Faculty Senate, October 24, 2003.
    • The resolution is dated October 8, because that is when it was submitted to the Faculty Senate for discussion. The Faculty Senate adopted it on October 24.
    • Summary:  Elsevier journals cost 50% of the UC online serials budget but attracted only 25% of the usage. Elsevier profits rose 26% the previous year. Elsevier has been inflexible in negotiations. Taking the University of California system in its entirety, 10-15% of Elsevier content was written by UC faculty, 1,000 UC faculty serve on Elsevier editorial boards, and 150 serve as senior editors. The resolution recommends using the California Digital Library, the related eScholarship Repository, and peer-reviewed OA journals from PLoS and BMC. It urges faculty to retain copyright, the right of postprint archiving, and the right to distribute copies of their work to their classes. "Therefore, the UCSC Academic Senate resolves to call upon its tenured members to give serious and careful consideration to cutting their ties with Elsevier: no longer submitting papers to Elsevier journals, refusing to referee the submissions of others, and relinquishing editorial posts. The Senate also calls upon its Committee on Academic Personnel to recognize that some faculty may choose not to submit papers to Elsevier journals even when those journals are highly ranked. Faculty choosing to follow the advice of this resolution should not be penalized."

  3. University of California at San Francisco:  Challenges to Sustaining Subscriptions for Scholarly Publications, memorandum to all UCSF faculty from Karen Butter, the University Librarian, and Leonard Zegans and David Rempel, co-chairs of the Committee on Library, November 1 2003.
    • Summary:  The memorandum cites many of the same numbers and complaints as the Santa Cruz resolution (above). While singling out Elsevier it also generalizes that many commercial publishers are using unsustainable business models. "The Committee suggests that all UC faculty consider alternatives to publishing in and editing Elsevier journals. New initiatives, such as Public Library of Science and BioMed Central, promise high-quality peer-reviewed content at affordable prices. The Committee also suggests that faculty consider taking action by retaining certain intellectual property rights, such as including the right to post their work with an institutional repository....Therefore, should the negotiations with Elsevier fail, the Committee on Library strongly recommends that members of the UCSF faculty give serious and careful consideration to their association with Elsevier and consider the following actions: cease submission of papers to Elsevier journals, refuse to referee the submissions of others, and relinquish editorial posts. We would encourage any UCSF faculty who elect to alter their relationship with an Elsevier journal to notify the journal of their reason for doing so. Authors may also consider crossing out the provision in a standard publication contract that gives exclusive ownership of a published article to the publisher and thereby retain the right to publish the work in an electronic medium (e.g. UC's eScholarship Repository or others.)"
    • The memorandum links to the web site on scholarly communication created by the University of California libraries (systemwide), which recommends that faculty "[s]upport open access journals and self-archiving".

  4. Harvard University:  Letter to the Harvard faculty from Sidney Verba, Director of the University Library, December 9, 2003.
    • Summary:  The letter announces Elsevier cancellations, which took effect January 1, 2004. The cancellations were "driven not only by current financial realities, but also —and perhaps more importantly— by the need to reassert control over our collections and to encourage new models for research publication at Harvard....Elsevier journals are by far the most expensive....Elsevier's 2004 contract proposal to NERL was not responsive to Harvard's objectives....Of greatest concern to the Digital Acquisitions Committee and to the University Library Council was the lack of any option by which Harvard could prune its holdings and reduce its level of spending. Libraries wishing to cancel subscriptions could do so, but only by incurring steeply increased fees that obliterate any potential savings —while Elsevier's revenues continued to rise....Toward this end, we have foregone the NERL Elsevier license in 2004 in order to regain control over Harvard library collections in a manner that responds to the University's academic programs. Instead, the libraries will purchase online access to Elsevier journals individually and selectively....Declining the bundled agreement and intentionally reducing our outlay for Elsevier titles will ultimately give us the ability to respond to the marketplace unfettered by such artificial constraints....We believe this action can be a springboard for a vigorous and sustained effort to foster new models of research publication at Harvard. This effort could take many forms, all of which will require the active involvement of Harvard's research community. On many levels, Harvard is changing the ways in which it does business."
    • Jeffrey Aguero, Libraries to Cut Academic Journals, Harvard Crimson, November 24, 2003.
    • Anon., Libraries take a stand, Harvard University Gazette, Feburary 5, 2004, p.10-11.

  5. Cornell University:  Resolution regarding the University Library's Policies on Serials Acquisitions, with Special Reference to Negotiations with Elsevier, adopted by the Faculty Senate, December 17, 2003.
    • Summary:  "At Cornell, Ithaca campus library budgets for materials increased by 149% during [the period 1986-2001], but the number of serials titles purchased increased by only 5% —at a time when the number of serials published increased by approximately 138%....Over the last decade Elsevier's price increases have often been over 10% and occasionally over 20% on a year to year basis....The [Elsevier] contract has been priced as a 'bundle,' that is, in such a way that, if the library cancels any of the Elsevier journals it currently subscribes to, the pricing of the other individual journals the library chooses to keep increases substantially. (The actual process is somewhat more complicated than this, but this is the end result.) Because the prices of the journals that are retained greatly increase when others are cancelled, the only way to achieve any real savings is to cancel a great many journals....The library, in consultation with affected faculty, has identified several hundred Elsevier journals for cancellation at the end of 2003....[T]he University Faculty Senate endorses the library's decision to withdraw from Elsevier's bundled pricing plan and undertake selective cancellation of Elsevier journals....Recognizing that the cost of Elsevier journals in particular is radically out of proportion with the importance of those journals to the library's serials collection (measured both in terms of the proportion of the total collection they represent and in terms of their use by and value to faculty and students), the University Faculty Senate encourages the library to seek in the near term, in consultation with the faculty, to reduce its expenditures on Elsevier journals to no more than 15% of its total annual serials acquisitions expenditures (from in excess of 20% in 2003)....Recognizing that the increasing control by large commercial publishers over the publication and distribution of the faculty's scholarship and research threatens to undermine core academic values promoting broad and rapid dissemination of new knowledge and unrestricted access to the results of scholarship and research, the University Faculty Senate encourages the library and the faculty vigorously to explore and support alternatives to commercial venues for scholarly communication."
    • The resolution links to a Cornell web site with background information on the problem and more details on the Cornell response.
    • Paula Hane, Cornell and Other University Libraries to Cancel Elsevier Titles, Information Today, November 17, 2003.
    • Jonathan Knight, Cornell axes Elsevier journals as prices rise, Nature, November 20, 2003 (accessible only to subscribers). Blog summary.
    • Anon., After failed negotiations, CU Library cancels Elsevier journal package, Cornell Chronicle, December 11, 2003.
    • Doris Small Helfer, Is the Big Deal Dead? Searcher, March 2004. Primarily on the Cornell action. [Not online.]

  6. University of California system:  Letter to all UC faculty from Lawrence Pitts, Chair of the Academic Senate, and the head librarians of the 11 UC campuses, January 7, 2004.
    • Summary:  The letter cites and summarizes the preceding actions taken by several of the UC campuses (above) and announces the cancellation of "approximately 200" journals. "The economics of scholarly journal publishing are incontrovertibly unsustainable. Taming price inflation is not enough. Unless we change the current model, academic libraries and universities will be unable to continue providing faculty, students, and staff with the access they require to the world's scholarship and knowledge. Scholars will be unable to make the results of their research widely available. These are not statements about any single company, about the strengths and weaknesses of for- and not-for-profit publishing, or about the prospects of open-access versus subscription-based journal models. They are merely observations about economic reality....[W]e are have been paying more for access to a smaller proportion of the world's published knowledge. If we are to halt or even reverse that trend, we must aggressively ramp up and institutionalize our efforts to change the scholarly communication process....The UC Libraries are working aggressively to...support alternative means for publishing scholarly materials that make high-quality peer-reviewed work available at an affordable price."
    • The university created a Special Committee on Scholarly Communication to examine new methods of scholarly communication.
    • Also see the web site on scholarly communication created by the University of California libraries (systemwide), which recommends that faculty "[s]upport open access journals and self-archiving".
    • On April 29, 2003, the UC Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee adopted a resolution on Digital Library Journal Collecting Principles. "To align costs with value, the Committee recommends that UC libraries, in close consultation with the faculty, initiate a Systemwide review and renegotiation of the University's contracts with publishers whose pricing practices are not sustainable."
    • Jennifer Murphy, Library struggles to fund access, Daily Bruin, November 17, 2003.
    • Elsevier issued its own press release on the California contract, emphasizing the volume of material the deal makes accessible to California users, January 10, 2004.
    • Anon., UC System Inks Five Year Deal with Elsevier, Stops Price Inflation, Library Journal, January 14, 2004.
    • Yvette Essen, Market Report, The Telegraph, January 20, 2004. Whether budget cuts in California will force the University of California to renegotiate its contract with Elsevier. Blog summary.
    • List of Elsevier titles for which the University of California libraries currently have subscriptions.

  7. Triangle Research Libraries Network:  Changes in Elsevier Science Access, memorandum to the Faculties (of Duke University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) from Peter Lange, Provost at Duke, James Oblinger, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor at NCSU, and Robert Shelton, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor at UNC at Chapel Hill, January 14, 2004.
    • The memorandum speaks for the entire TRLN consortium, which has four university members. However, the memorandum is only addressed to the faculties of three members. I don't know why the fourth, North Carolina Central University, was omitted.
    • Summary:  "[T]he member universities of the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) have decided to discontinue the consortial arrangement by which they provided access to electronic journals published under the Elsevier Science imprint....Throughout months of renewal negotiations with Elsevier, TRLN and its member libraries have articulated two principal objectives: [1] To regain and maintain control over library collecting decisions in order to meet the constantly evolving information needs of faculty, researchers, and students; and [2] To manage overall costs in order to keep Elsevier expenditures consistent with materials budgets that have not been increasing at anywhere near Elsevier's annual inflation rate. Elsevier's final offer fails to meet both of these objectives....Because Elsevier Science has not offered TRLN a pricing model responsive to the needs of the consortium, TRLN has elected to terminate its consortial arrangement with Reed Elsevier. Each TRLN library will now make individual arrangements for Elsevier journal access on its own campus....Although libraries and universities are supporting new publishing models in an effort to maintain access to high-quality, peer-reviewed research at a manageable cost, there is still a reliance on the products of for-profit publishers. As a result of this dynamic, libraries can no longer offer the same range of publications to the academic community....The libraries...will begin to explore with you new models of scholarly communication that may, in the long term, help reduce costs and make scholarly information more widely available."
    • TRLN member North Carolina State University adopted a separate Resolution on Bundled Content and Elsevier on December 2, 2003. "Whereas, open access and communication of scholarly research are fundamental to intellectual and academic freedom and critical to economic growth and development...Resolved, that the North Carolina State University Faculty Senate affirm the responsibility of the university, through its Libraries, to maintain strong and flexible control over the state funds entrusted to it and for the Libraries to continue to make sound fiscal decisions that will provide balanced collections that meet the current and future needs of NC State Faculty and Students including the ability to decline highly restrictive offers, such as those recently proposed by Reed Elsevier for its ScienceDirect online product."
    • Eric Ferreri, Colleges ax journals deal, the Durham NC Herald-Sun, January 12, 2004. Blog summary.
    • Anon., TRLN to Forgo the Big Deal, Library Journal, January 14, 2004.
    • Kenneth Ball, Libraries cancel Elsevier contract, North Carolina State University's TechnicianOnline, January 16, 2004.
    • Kenneth Ball, Senate Backs Libraries, North Carolina State University's Technician Online, December 4, 2003. Blog summary.
    • Anon., NCSU Faculty Takes Hard Line on New Elsevier Deal, Library Journal, December 8, 2004.
    • Joseph Schwartz, Campus to drop journal contract, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Daily Tar Heel, January 16, 2004.

  8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT):  Announcement on the MIT Libraries web site.
    • I blogged this news on February 6, 2004, when it seemed to be fairly new. But the web site says it was last updated on December 16, 2003. I haven't yet been able to find other web pages showing which date is more accurate. My guess is that it's February news and the revision date on the page is in error.
    • Summary:  "The MIT Libraries have recently taken steps to reduce the impact of two large commercial publishers on our ability to make responsible decisions in selecting information resources for use at MIT. Specifically, we declined three-year renewal contracts that would have required us to guarantee on-going spending levels with Wiley InterScience and Elsevier Science. These actions ensure that if the Libraries need to reduce spending in the next year or two, we can make those decisions based solely on the specific needs of the MIT user community, without giving unfair advantage to certain publishers....The decision to decline the three-year renewals was difficult because the terms for one-year renewals were considerably less attractive. However, the one-year renewals put us in a position of being able to cancel titles next year if we need to."
    • The announcement links to an MIT web page with more background information.

  9. University of Connecticut, Resolution, adopted by the Faculty Senate, February 9, 2004.
    • Summary:  "Access to the scholarly literature is vital to all members of the academic community. Scholars and their professional associations share a common interest in the broadest possible dissemination of peer-reviewed contributions. Unfortunately, the business practices of some journals and journal publishers is inimical to these interests and threatens to limit the promise of increased access inherent in digital technologies. Development of library collections is more and more constrained by the rising costs of journals and databases. Faculty, staff, students, and university adminstrators must all take greater responsibility for the scholarly communication system. Therefore, the University Senate calls on all faculty, staff, and students of the University of Connecticut to become familiar with the business practices of journals and journal publishers in their specialty. It especially encourages senior tenured faculty to reduce their support of journals or publishers whose practices are inconsistent with the health of scholarly communication by submitting fewer papers to such journals, by refereeing fewer papers submitted to such journals, or by resigning from editorial posts associated with such journals. It encourages them to increase their support of existing journals and publishers whose practices are consistent with the health of scholarly communication. The Senate also calls on University administrators and departmental, school, college and University committees to reward efforts by faculty, staff, and students to start or support more sustainable models for scholarly communication. It calls on them to provide financial and material support to faculty, staff, and students whose work helps to ensure broad access to the scholarly literature. It also calls on professional associations and the University to invest in the infrastructure necessary to support new venues for peer-reviewed publication."
    • Before it adopted this resolution, the Faculty Senate deleted a recommendation (contained e.g. in the Santa Cruz resolution) that tenure and promotion committees should respect faculty decisions to follow the advice of the resolution. See the minutes of the faculty meeting (scroll to item 8).
    • Also see the University of Connecticut Libraries' web site on the scholarly communication crisis.

  10. Stanford University:  Faculty senate approves measure targeting for-profit journal publishers, a press release issued February 24, 2004. The press release is based on a February 19 vote of the Faculty Senate.
    • A slightly revised version of the press release was issued on February 25, 2004.
    • Summary:  With one dissenting vote, the Faculty Senate voted to encourage "libraries to cancel some costly journal subscriptions and faculty to withhold articles and reviews from publishers who engage in questionable pricing practices. The motion singled out publishing giant Elsevier as deserving special attention. 'We're not doing this to position ourselves to negotiate more effectively with Elsevier,' said University Librarian Michael Keller. 'We're doing this to change the whole scene. We're trying to change the fundamental nature of scholarly communication in the journal industry.'...'I think it's going to take a long time for its prestige and cachet to wear out,' [biology professor Robert] Simoni said. 'There are still so many people who think publishing in Cell is going to make their career that they'll still get submissions. But if institutions like Stanford and others stop subscribing to journals like Cell, authors will eventually realize that their work is not being seen. This is an evolutionary change and it will take time."
    • My summary is based on the press release. But also see how the action was recorded in the Faculty Senate minutes.
    • Michael Miller, Fac Sen discusses journal fees, The Stanford Daily, February 6, 2004. Stanford discusses how to respond to the serials crisis.
    • Ryan Sands, Fac Sen addresses costly journals, The Stanford Daily, February 20, 2004.
    • Linda Cicero, At What Cost? Stanford Magazine, June 2004.

  11. University of Maryland:  Changes in Access to Journals Published by Reed Elsevier, a letter from William W. Destler, Provost, to the faculty, February 20, 2004.
    • Summary:  The university cancelled consortial access to the Baltimore campus subscriptions and converted the College Park campus subscriptions to electronic-only. It describes the failed Elsevier negotiations in language similar to that in the TRLN statement above, and then continues. "By retaining the ability to cancel titles, the Libraries maintain the option of building collections with other publishers' titles where they provide greater value to the campus community....The University of Maryland is working with other research universities to address this crisis. One example of this type of work is the Libraries' participation in the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition [SPARC]....I firmly believe that universities must address this crisis in the system of scholarly communication. Our libraries need our support in their work with the university community to regain control of their budgets, their collections, and the intellectual property that is the ultimate output of the research enterprise. I encourage you to continue to engage in discussions with our library faculty about what we are doing to explore new models of scholarly communication and restore a measure of rationality to the publishing system. It is important to extend the discussion beyond our campus as well, especially for those of you who serve on editorial boards of journals published commercially or by learned societies."

  12. Indiana University at Bloomington:  Resolution on Journals, Databases, and Threats to Scholarly Publication, adopted by the Bloomington Faculty Council, February 27, 2004.
    • Summary:  "The continuing escalation of serial prices, which have more than doubled in the past 10 years, is unsustainable in the long run. The increase is due to a number of factors: the information explosion, the expansion of electronic capabilities by publishing groups, as well as the growth of mega-publishers whose profits greatly exceed the Consumer Price Index....Scholars and their professional associations share a common interest in the broadest possible dissemination of peer-reviewed contributions. Unfortunately, it is the business practices of a few large journals and journal publishers that threaten to limit the promise of increased access inherent in digital technologies. Therefore, the Bloomington Faculty Council [A] calls on all faculty, staff, students, and university administrators of Indiana University Bloomington to work toward a more open publishing system by increasing their support of existing refereed journals and publishers whose practices are consistent with open access to scholarly communication and to support those who make such choices when considering tenure and promotion; [B] encourages faculty and staff to separate themselves from publishers with a narrow focus on profits at the expense of open scholarly publication; [C] calls on the university Libraries to educate faculty, staff, students, and university administrators on the business practices of different journals and journal publishers and their impact on the health of scholarly communication and on our Libraries at Indiana University Bloomington." The preamble adds the specific recommendations that faculty consider "withholding publications from their journals or choosing not to sit on their editorial boards" and that "[i]n tenure and promotion decisions faculty and staff must be confident that there is departmental and university support for their decisions to publish in referred journals with more open access."
    • Chris Freiberg, Council approves code revisions, Indiana Digital Student News, March 3, 2004.

  13. Macalester College:  Background Information on Science Direct Decision, February 29, 2004.
    • Summary:  Macalaster decided not to sign a three-year renewal of ScienceDirect. "The reality is we just can't commit to the inflexibility of not cancelling any Elsevier titles....[W]e invited faculty members in the sciences divisions to a meeting on Monday, Nov. 10th. At that meeting, we shared the details of the contract and we presented three options including to stay as a participant within the deal, and we explained that by not participating we would not have electronic access to the Elsevier titles we purchased in print. It was a small group, but they were all in agreement, giving up electronic access and access to a significant number of journals that many of them used was a sacrifice that needed to be made and one that they supported."
    • The page links to other university resolutions and summaries of the pricing crisis. It also links to Macalaster-produced PPT slides on the options Macalaster faced.
    • Macalester signed the joint press release issued by four private Minnesota liberal arts colleges in May 2004, spurning ScienceDirect in favor of open access. See the next entry below.

  14. Carleton College, Gustavus Adolphus College, Macalester College, and St. Olaf College:  Press Release on Science Direct Decision, May 2004.
    • Summary:  The four decisions were independent, but the colleges issued a joint press release. "While the reasons and decision processes were somewhat different on each campus, we are all convinced that the escalating prices for many scientific journals are unsustainable and that the time has come for change....Our faculties are aware that this decision will result in a painful reduction in a overall journal access in the short term. But they are supporting us because they understand that it is in the long term interests of our institutions to reassert control over our collections and to encourage new, more sustainable publishing models....Open access journals are a clear alternative to the unsustainable bundling of journals, which prohibits cancellations and which consistently increase at rates of 5-8% per year. We are working with other colleges and universities to address this crisis by supporting the work of SPARC, Public Library of Science, and other groups that seek to increase broad and cost-effective access to peer reviewed scholarship. In declining the Science Direct offer we are joining an increasing number of institutions signaling that we are serious in our demands for reasonable pricing for scholarly communication." The press release recommends that faculty at the four colleges avoid writing or reviewing "for journals that are not moving towards an open access model" and that they retain the rights to authorize open access. It recommends that the four colleges establish institutional repositories and adopt "policies that signal that publication in quality open access journals is acceptable in the institutions' system of rewards and recognition."
    • Anon., Four Small Minnesota Colleges Say No to the "Big Deal", Library Journal, May 25, 2004.

What you can do to help the cause of open access

  • Universities

    • Faculty
      • Submit your research articles to OA journals, when there are appropriate OA journals in your field.
      • Deposit your preprints in an open-access, OAI-compliant archive.
        • It could be a disciplinary or institutional archive.
        • If your institution doesn't have one already, then faculty or librarians should launch one. See the list for librarians, below.
        • There is no comprehensive list of open-access, OAI-compliant archives, but I've listed the best lists above.
        • If you have questions about archiving your eprints, then see Stevan Harnad's Self-Archiving FAQ.
      • Deposit your postprints in an open-access OAI-compliant archive.
        • The "postprint" is the version accepted by the peer-review process of a journal, often after some revision.
        • If you transferred copyright to the journal, then postprint archiving requires the journal's permission. Many journals consent in advance to this. Some will consent when asked. Some will not consent. For journal policies about copyright and author archiving, see the searchable database maintained by Project SHERPA.
        • If you have not yet transferred copyright to the journal, then ask to retain copyright. (More below.)
          • If the journal does not let you retain copyright, then ask at least for the right of postprint archiving.
          • If it does not let you retain the right to archive your postprint, then ask for permission to put the postprint on your personal web site. For many journals, the difference between OA through an archive and OA through a personal web site is significant.
          • If it does not let you put the postprint on your personal web site, then simply post the preprint and the corrigenda (differences between the preprint and postprint) to the archive or to your personal web site.
      • Ask journals to let you retain copyright.
        • When you can, negotiate either (1) to retain copyright and transfer only the right of first print and electronic publication, or (2) to transfer copyright but retain the right of postprint archiving.
        • Many journals say that authors must transfer copyright, but will show some flexibility if you ask individually. Even when journals refuse to let authors retain copyright, it's important for them to hear from authors who want them to change their policy about this.
        • For advice on negotiating the copyright transfer agreement with a journal, and suggested language to include in the agreement, see SPARC's page on Copyright Resources for Authors.
      • Deposit your data files in an OA archive along with the articles built on them. If possible, cite the data files in the articles so that readers know where to find them.
      • Negotiate with conventional journals to try the Walker-Prosser method of experimenting with OA.
        • Namely:  if the journal is not already OA, it might still offer OA to individual articles when the authors or their sponsors pay an upfront fee to cover the journal's costs in vetting and preparing the text. See Thomas Walker's article that first proposed this method and David Prosser's article that refined it.
        • There's no harm in asking, and it helps the cause if the labor of asking journals to consider OA experiments is distributed among the authors with an interest in OA publication.
      • Consider launching an OA journal in your area of specialization.
      • When asked to referee a paper or serve on the editorial board for an OA journal, accept the invitation.
      • When asked to referee a paper or serve on the editorial board for a toll-access journal, consider declining and explaining why.
        • Faculty needn't donate their time and labor to journals that lock up their content behind access barriers where it is less useful to the profession. Universities should support faculty who make this otherwise career-jeopardizing decision. Faculty don't need to boycott priced journals, but they don't need to assist them either.
      • If you are an editor of a toll-access journal, then start an in-house discussion about converting to OA, experimenting with OA, letting authors retain copyright, abolishing the Ingelfinter rule, or declaring independence (quitting and launching an OA journal to serve the same research niche).
        • For more ideas of what journals can do, see the list for journals below.
      • Ask the journals to which you regularly submit articles to do more to support OA. For example, see the list of what journals can do, below.
      • When applying for research grants, ask the foundation for funds to pay the processing fees charged by OA journals. Many foundations are already on the record as willing to do this. For the rest, it's important to ask.
      • Volunteer to serve on your university's committee to evaluate faculty for promotion and tenure. Make sure the committee is using criteria that, at the very least, do not penalize faculty for publishing in peer-reviewed OA journals. At best, adjust the criteria to give faculty an incentive to provide OA to their peer-reviewed research articles and preprints, either through OA journals or OA archives.
        • For more on how these criteria need revision (and therefore how you could help if you served on the committee), see the section on administrators, below.
      • See the list of what administrators can do. Work with your administration to adopt university-wide policies that promote OA. When administrators don't understand OA, educate them.
        • Of all the items on that list, the most important may be to urge your institution to create an open-access OAI-compliant eprint archive and adopt policies encouraging faculty to fill it with their research articles.
      • Work with fellow members of professional societies to make sure they understand OA. Persuade the organization to make its own journals OA, endorse OA for other journals in the field, and support OA eprint archiving by all scholars in the field.
        • If the society launches a disciplinary eprint archive for the field, consider offering to have your university host it, just as arXiv (for example) is hosted by Cornell.
        • Also see the list of what learned societies can do.
      • Create an online index or database of the OA sources in your field.
      • Consider becoming an individual member of the Public Library of Science.
      • Keep up with open-access news.
      • Write opinion pieces (articles, journal editorials, newspapers op-eds, letters to the editor, discussion forum postings) advancing the cause of OA.
      • Help document the benefits of open access or the harms caused by the lack of it.
      • See the overview of the issues for university faculty (from Create Change).
      • Educate the next generation of scientists and scholars about OA.
        • Make sure that new researchers (and experienced older researchers too!) understand their self-interest in OA. Make sure they understand that OA increases the impact of research articles.
        • Or, at a minimum, don't let myths about OA circulate without challenge, e.g. that OA violates copyright, dispenses with peer review, or presupposes that journals have no expenses.

    • Librarians
      • Launch an open-access, OAI-compliant institutional eprint archive, for both texts and data.
        • The main reason for universities to have institutional repositories is to enhance the visibility and impact of the research output of the university, its publishing faculty, and the institution itself.
        • A more specific reason is that a growing number of journals allow authors to deposit their postprints in institutional but not disciplinary repositories. Even though this is an almost arbitrary distinction, institutions without repositories will leave some of their faculty stranded with no way to provide OA to their work.
        • "OAI-compliant" means that the archive complies with the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). This makes the archive interoperable with other compliant archives so that the many separate archives behave like one grand, virtual archive for purposes such as searching. This means that users can search across OAI-compliant archives without visiting the separate archives and running separate searches. Hence, it makes your content more visible, even if users don't know that your archive exists or what it contains.
        • There are a handful of open-source packages for creating and maintaining such archives. The four most important are eprints (from Southampton University), DSpace (from MIT), CDSWare (from CERN), and FEDORA (from Cornell and U. of Virginia).
        • When building the case for an archive among colleagues and administrators, see The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper, by Raym Crow.
        • When deciding which software to use, see the BOAI Guide to Institutional Repository Software.
        • When implementing the archive, see the SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist & Resource Guide.
      • Help faculty deposit their research articles in the institutional archive.
        • Many faculty are more than willing, just too busy. Some suffer from tech phobias. Some might need education about the benefits.
        • For example, see how the St. Andrews University Library offers to help faculty.
      • Consider publishing an open-access journal.
      • Consider rejecting the big deal, or cancelling journals that cannot justify their high prices, and issue a public statement explaining why.
        • See my list of other universities that have already done so. If they give you courage and ideas, realize that you can do the same for others.
        • Give presentations to the faculty senate, or the library committee, or to separate departments, educating faculty and adminstrators about the scholarly communication crisis and showing how open access is part of any comprehensive solution. You will need faculty and administrative support for these decisions, but other universities have succeeded in getting it.
      • Help OA journals launched at the university become known to other libraries, indexing services, potential funders, potential authors, and potential readers.
      • Include OA journals in the library catalog.
        • The Directory of Open Access Journals offers its journal metadata free for downloading. For tips on how to use these records, see the 2003 discussion thread on the ERIL list (readable only by list subscribers) or Joan Conger's summary of the thread (readable by everyone).
        • Take other steps to insure that students and faculty doing research at your institution know about OA sources, not just traditional print and toll-access sources.
      • Offer to assure the long-term preservation of some specific body of OA content.
        • OA journals suffer from the perception that they cannot assure long-term preservation. Libraries can come to their rescue and negate this perception. For example, in September 2003 the National Library of the Netherlands agreed to do this for all BioMed Central journals. This is a major library offering to preserve a major collection, but smaller libraries can do the same for smaller collections.
      • Annotate OA articles and books with their metadata.
        • OA content is much more useful when it is properly annotated with metadata. University librarians could start by helping their own faculty annotate their own OA works. But if they have time (or university funding) left over, then they could help the cause by annotating other OA content as a public service.
      • Undertake digitization, access, and preservation projects not only for faculty, but for local groups, e.g. non-profits, community organizations, museums, galleries, libraries. Show the benefits of OA to the non-academic community surrounding the university, especially the non-profit community.
      • Negotiate with vendors of priced electronic content (journals and databases) for full access by walk-in patrons.
        • A September 2003 article in Scientific American suggests that only a minority of libraries already do this.
      • Help design impact measurements (like e.g. citation correlator) that take advantage of the many new kinds of usage data available for OA sources.
        • The OA world needs this and it seems that only librarians can deliver it. We need measures other than the standard impact factor. We need measures that are article-based (as opposed to journal or institution based), that can be automated, that don't oversimplify, and that take full advantage of the plethora of data available for OA resources unavailable for traditional print resources.
        • Librarians can also help pressure existing indices and impact measures to cover OA sources.
      • Join SPARC, a consortium of academic libraries actively promoting OA.
      • See the overview of the issues for librarians (from Create Change).

    • Administrators
      • Adopt a policy: In hiring, promotion, and tenure, the university will give due weight to all peer-reviewed publications, regardless of price or medium.
        • More:  The university will stop using criteria that penalize and deter publication in OA journals. All criteria that depend essentially on prestige or impact factors fall into this category. These criteria are designed to deny recognition to second-rate contributions, which is justified until they start to deny recognition to first-rate contributions. These criteria intrinsically deny recognition to new publications, even if excellent, that have not had time to earn prestige or impact factors commensurate with their quality. Because these criteria fail to recognize many worthy contributions to the field, they are unfair to the candidates undergoing review. They also perpetuate a vicious circle that deters submissions to new journals, and thereby hinders the launch of new journals, even if the new journals would pursue important new topics, methods, or funding and access policies. Therefore they retard disciplinary progress as well as the efficiency of scholarly communication.
        • On February 27, 2004, the Indiana University Bloomington Faculty Council adopted a resolution with this language: "In tenure and promotion decisions faculty and staff must be confident that there is departmental and university support for their decisions to publish in referred journals with more open access." (Details above.)
      • See to it that the university launches an open-access, OAI-compliant archive. See details under librarians, above.
      • Adopt policies encouraging or requiring faculty to fill the institutional archive with their research articles and preprints.
        • For example, the university could require that any articles to be considered in a promotion and tenure review must be on deposit in the university's OA archive, with a working URL in the resume. For articles based on data generated by the author, the data files should also be on deposit in the archive. For books, authors should deposit the metadata and reference lists. For other kinds of output, faculty could deposit the metadata plus whatever other digital materials they wish to make accessible.
        • According to the JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey Report (February 2004, pp. 56-57), when authors are asked "how they would feel if their employer or funding body required them to deposit copies of their published articles in one or more [open-access] repositories...[t]he vast majority, even of the non-OA author group, said they would do so willingly." (Italics in original.)
        • See the exemplary policy at Queensland University of Technology that took effect on January 1, 2004. "Material which represents the total publicly available research and scholarly output of the University is to be located in the University's digital or 'E-print' repository, subject to the exclusions noted...."
        • Also the model policy developed at Southampton University.
        • For other exemplary university policies, see the summaries provided by signatories to the Southampton Declaration of Institutional Commitment.
        • Also see the notes on developing a policy from the Eprints Handbook.
        • The university could pay for a digital librarian (whole or fractional FTE) to help faculty put their past publications into digital form, deposit them in the university archive, and enter the relevant metadata. Many OA-friendly faculty are simply too busy to do this for themselves.
        • Many universities have institutional archives, but do nothing to fill them. Faculty who understand the issues already have an incentive to deposit their articles and preprints. But the university should create incentives, and offer assistance, to those who don't yet understand the issues or who don't have the time to deposit their own eprints.
      • Adopt a policy: faculty who publish articles must either (1) retain copyright, and transfer only the right of first print and electronic publication, or (2) transfer copyright but retain the right of postprint archiving.
      • Adopt a policy: when faculty cannot get the funds to pay the processing fee charged by an OA journal from their research grant, then the university will pay the fee.
        • If the university is worried about a runaway expense, then it could cap the number of dollars or articles per faculty member per year, and raise the cap over time as the spread of OA brings about larger and larger savings to the library serials budget. In the case of publications based on funded research, the university could offer to pay the fees only when the funding agencies have been asked and will not pay.
      • Adopt a policy: all theses and dissertations, upon acceptance, must be made openly accessible, for example, through the institutional repository or one of the multi-institutional OA archives for theses and dissertations.
      • Adopt a policy: all conferences hosted at your university will provide open access to their presentations or proceedings, even if the conference also chooses to publish them in a priced journal or book. This is compatible with charging a registration fee for the conference.
      • Adopt a policy: all journals hosted or published by your university will either be OA or take steps to be friendlier to OA. For example, see the list of what journals can do, below.
      • Have your institution sign the Declaration of Institutional Commitment to implement open-access policies on campus.
      • If your university is in the UK, or if it is subject to any research assessment process similar to the UK's Research Assessment Exercise, then consider the model policy from Stevan Harnad et al. for ensuring that institutional research output is OA and that faculty use standardized, online CV's linking to OA versions of their research articles.
      • Support, even reward, faculty who launch OA journals.
        • For example: give them released time, technical support, server space, secretarial help, promotion and tenure credit, publicity, strokes.
        • Related: give due recognition to faculty who serve as editors or referees for OA journals, at least if this recognition is given for similar service on important traditional journals. Most OA journals, because they are new, haven't acquired the prestige of established, conventional journals, even if their quality is just as high or even higher. Universities should support faculty who help bring about a superior publishing alternative, not just those who bring prestige to themselves and the university through existing channels.
      • Consider buying an institutional membership in BioMed Central, or an institutional membership or sponsorship in the Public Library of Science.
      • If your university uses DSpace, then consider joining the DSpace Federation.
      • Sign the Budapest Open Access Initiative as an institution.
      • Sign the Declaration of Institutional Commitment to implement the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Berlin Declaration, and WSIS Principles on open access to research literature.

    • Students
      • As the researchers of the future, take your changed expectations with you. Researchers will finally take advantage of the internet in scholarly communication when a generation that has grown up with the internet occupies positions of responsibility in universities, laboratories, libraries, foundations, journals, publishers, learned socieites, government funding agencies, and legislatures.
      • As expert users, help faculty, e.g. by archiving their papers for them or pointing them to relevant OA resources.
      • As programmers, develop open-source tools for open access.
      • Take part in the student-led Free Culture movement. Make sure that open access to research literature has its place on the agenda along side open-source software, copyright reform, and other free culture issues.

    • Other
      • Use the university OA infrastructure as another way to offer outreach to the community. For example, invite community groups to use the university's OA archive. The university could offer to digitize, host, and preserve content for some non-profit organizations in the area.
      • Public universities should explain to the citizens of their state, state legislators, and state newspapers, why their new OA policies are maximizing the return on tax dollars, and how they put the university in the vanguard of enlightened institutions. Private institutions can make the same argument to donors, parents, and students.
      • If a university adopts a systematic plan to promote OA, through its faculty, librarians, and administration, then it should launch a central web site for the plan, and perhaps a newsletter, to explain its many facets, monitor progress, publicize the rationale, and show which elements are still to come.
        • For those who worry about funding this grand plan: Many parts of the plan are either costless or result in net savings. Many others will bring waves of good publicity, which will help the bottom line through improved recruitment and retention, soft money, or alumni loyalty. All parts directly advance the university's mission to share, preserve, and extend knowledge.

  • Journals and publishers
    • Let authors retain copyright. Ask only for the right of first print and electronic publication.
    • Let authors archive both their preprints and their postprints.
      • See the many journal publishers who already do.
      • Letting authors archive their preprints really means abandoning the Ingelfinger rule; more on this below. Since authors are usually the copyright holders at the time they archive their preprints, journals have no right to block it, only a right to refuse to consider submissions that have previously circulated as preprints; this is what they should reconsider. Letting authors archive their postprints only applies if the journal asks authors to transfer copyright in the postprint to the journal.
      • Allowing these forms of OA isn't a "sacrifice" or "concession" to authors and readers. It gives you a competitive advantage in attracting submissions over journals that do not permit them.
    • Experiment with open access.
      • For example, a journal can give authors the choice between open access and conventional publication. Authors who choose OA must pay an upfront processing fee to cover the journal's costs in vetting and preparing the article. This method was first described by Thomas Walker (here) and later refined by David Prosser (here).
      • Experiment with advertising, priced add-ons, and auxiliary services to generate the revenue needed to cover your expenses, so that you can offer OA to more and more full-text research articles.
      • If you enhance your authors' basic texts with expensive add-ons, consider offering OA to the basic texts and only charging for access to the enhanced edition.
      • If you can't offer immediate OA to full-text articles, then consider offering OA after some delay or embargo period.
    • If you still use the Ingelfinger rule (a policy against accepting papers previously published or publicized), then modify it to permit preprint archiving.
      • If you will accept papers whose preprints have previously been circulated online, say so explicitly on your web site. Many researchers are deterred from preprint archiving by groundless fears of the Ingelfinger rule.
    • Make sure your journal's copyright and archiving policies are accurately listed by Project SHERPA.
    • Consider providing free online access to your article metadata, even if you aren't ready to provide free online access to the articles themselves.
      • If the metadata are harvestable under the OAI protocol, then your articles will be more visible, searchable, and discoverable. Read this case study on how Inderscience, a medium-sized publisher of priced journals in engineering and business, created an OAI-compliant archive to expose the metadata for its publications. Inderscience decided that the OAI methods for sharing metadata were more effective and less expensive than traditional marketing.
      • Book publishers should consider the same strategy.
    • If your back run is not already digital, then participate in the PubMed Central Back Issue Digitization program, which includes PMC-hosted free online access to the newly-digitized back run.
    • If you are considering the OA business model, then see the BOAI Guide to Business Planning for Converting a Subscription-based Journal to Open Access.
    • Journal editors:  If your publisher resists your efforts to lower the journal price, revise its copyright and archiving policies, or initiate OA experiments, then consider changing publishers.
    • If you are already a peer-reviewed, open-access journal, then:
      • Deposit your accepted papers in an OAI-compliant archive. This additional source for your published papers assures authors and readers that the papers will remain OA even if your journal dies, is bought out, or changes its access policies. For example, both BMC and PLoS deposit all their published papers in PubMed Central.
      • Make sure you are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
      • Share your business data with researchers studying the OA-journal business model. If you are economically viable, your data will help document the viability of the model and help persuade skeptical publishers to experiment with OA. The ALPSP is one organization seeking business data from OA journals as part of just such a study.
      • See Getting your journal indexed from SPARC.
      • You may benefit from the experience of the Public Library of Science. See its guide, Publishing Open-Access Journals, originally released in February 2004, but to be updated as needed.

  • Learned societies and professional associations
    • If you publish a journal, consider making it open access.
    • Adopt the policy that all conferences sponsored by your society will provide open access to their proceedings, even if you also choose to publish them in a priced journal or book. See details under "universities", above.
    • Encourage your members to archive their preprints and postprints in open-access, OAI-compliant archives.
    • Endorse open access for all journals, dissertations, and conference proceedings in your field. See the policy statements already made by other learned societies and professional organizations.
    • Maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date online list of OA resources in your field. Societies have more credibility and more resources than individuals, who tend to take the lead in maintaining such guides.

  • Foundations and research funding agencies
    • Put an OA condition on research grants, so that in accepting a grant, the grantee agrees to provide OA to the results of the funded research.
      • The condition should give grantees a choice of ways to provide OA. In particular, it ought to give grantees the choice between OA archives and OA journals.
      • For one way to do this, see my Model Open-Access Policy for Foundation Research Grants. I don't pretend that foundations could adopt it as is. But it does try to imagine the practical complexities of putting an OA condition on research grants, and it offers contract terms that address these complexities. If my solutions to these problems don't suit a particular foundation, then perhaps my annotations will at least identify some of the issues and help it save time in its deliberations.
      • According to the JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey Report (February 2004, pp. 56-57), when authors are asked "how they would feel if their employer or funding body required them to deposit copies of their published articles in one or more [open-access] repositories...[t]he vast majority, even of the non-OA author group, said they would do so willingly." (Italics in original.)
    • When a grant recipient publishes the results of funded research in an OA journal that charges a processing fee, offer to pay the fee. Consider the cost of OA dissemination to be part of the cost of research.
      • Even better:  encourage grantees to submit their work to OA journals when there are suitable ones in the field.
      • Even better:  earmark some grant funds for OA journal processing fees. That way grantees will not have to reduce their research funds in order to pay the fees.
    • Give grants to universities to help create institutional eprint archives and to provide the necessary support for filling and maintaining them.
    • Give grants to individual researchers to cover the processing fees charged by open-access journals.
    • Give grants to new open-access journals to help them launch and establish themselves. Give grants to newly formed editorial boards that want to launch new open-access journals.
    • Give grants to open-access journals to cover the processing fees of authors who cannot afford to pay them.
    • Give grants to conventional journals to cover the costs of converting to open access.
    • Give grants to conventional journals to cover the costs of digitizing their back runs, on the condition that they will then provide open access to them.
    • Allow your grants to be used for building endowments for open access journals and archives. Endowed OA journals and archives will not need to seek further funding from any source.
    • Ask researchers applying for grants to deposit their existing peer-reviewed research articles in OA archives, and to maintain a standardized, online CV linking to OA versions of these articles. For more details, see this 2003 article by Stevan Harnad, Les Carr, Tim Brody, and Charles Oppenheim.

  • Governments
    • Put an OA condition on government research grants, so that in accepting a grant, the grantee agrees to provide OA to the results of the funded research.
      • See the section on foundations above, for more detail, especially on giving grantees a choice between OA archives and OA journals.
      • Funding agencies could make exceptions for classified research, patentable discoveries, and publications that generate revenue for authors such as books and software.
      • The issues are largely the same between private and public funding agencies. But governments can adopt uniform legislation covering all government agencies that fund research. Governments can also appeal to the taxpayer argument (that taxpayers should not have to pay a second fee for access to the results of taxpayer-funded research) in addition to the return-on-investment argument (that any funding agency will increase the return on its investment in research if it makes the results OA and thereby makes them more discoverable, retrievable, accessible, and useful).
    • Permit recipients of government research grants to use grant funds to pay the processing fees charged by OA journals.
      • See the section on foundations above, for more detail.
    • Insure that, as a matter of law, works produced by government employees in their official capacity are in the public domain. (This is already the case in the United States; see 17 USC 105 and its legislative history.)
      • Treat government-funded works in the same way. In the U.S., the Public Access to Science Act (submitted by Martin Sabo in June 2003) would have this effect.
      • Or learn from the U.S. experience with the Sabo bill by requiring open access itself (through archives or journals), rather than just a legal precondition of open access (the public domain). For details on how to do this, see the section on foundations above. In addition, use copyright-holder consent, rather than the public domain, as the legal precondition for open access, and avoid alienating the important constituencies and legislators who are friendly to both open access and copyright. Finally, make reasonable exceptions e.g. for classified research, patentable discoveries, books, and software. The open-access bill should apply only or primarily to works that authors willingly publish without payment, such as journal articles and dissertations.
    • Consider a nationally-coordinated program to insure open access to the research output of the nation. This was pioneered by Holland with Project DARE. Similar initiatives (with interesting differences) are under consideration or under way in Australia, Canada, Germany, and India.
    • Sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

  • Citizens
    • See the list of what governments can do. Demand that your government take some of those steps. Talk to your representatives about the issues. Make clear that these issues are important to you, and that you expect your government to support science and the public interest over the private interests of publishers.
    • In particular, demand that research funded by taxpayers be made available to the public free of charge.

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Peter Suber
Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
Senior Researcher, SPARC
peters@earlham.edu

Copyright © 2001-2004, Peter Suber. This is an open-access document.