Ada Emmett

Bottlenecks in the Open-Access System: Voices from Around the Globe

Abstract A level playing field is key for global participation in science and scholarship, particularly with regard to how scientific publications are financed and subsequently accessed. However, there are potential pitfalls of the so-called “Gold” open-access (OA) route, in which author-paid publication charges cover the costs of production and publication. Gold OA plans in which author charges are required may not solve the access problem, but rather may shift the access barrier from reader to writer. Under such plans, everyone may be free to read papers, but it may still be prohibitively expensive to publish them. In a scholarly community that is increasingly global, spread over more and more regions and countries of the world, these publication access barriers may be quite significant. In the present paper, a global suite of colleagues in academe joins this debate. The group of colleagues, a network of researchers active in scholarly publishing, spans four continents and multiple disciplines in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, as well as diverse political and economic situations. We believe that this global sampling of researchers can provide the nuance and perspective necessary to grasp this complex problem. The group was assembled without an attempt to achieve global coverage through random sampling. This contribution differs from other approaches to the open-access problem in several fundamental ways. (A) It is scholar-driven, and thus can represent the ‘other side of the coin’ of scholarly communication. (B) It focuses on narrative report, where scholars were free to orient their responses as they saw fit, rather than being confined to binary or scalar choices. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, (C) it distinguishes among institutions and countries and situations, highlighting inequalities of access among wealthy and economically-challenged nations, and also within countries depending on the size and location of particular institutions.

Open Access and the Author-Pays Problem: Assuring Access for Readers and Authors in a Global Community of Scholars

Out of concern for its lifeblood—communication—academia is rushing to correct serious inequities in access and revenue distribution by embracing open access (OA) in a variety of ways: some journals provide access openly to all readers, some allow authors to pay for OA options, some share copyrights with authors to allow open sharing, etc. For publication in some fully OA journals, though, publication charges associated with an ‘author-pays’ business model can be substantial, reflecting costs involved in production and publication of quality scholarly articles and (sometimes) significant profit margins for publishers. Such charges may constitute significant barriers for potential authors, particularly those at institutions or in countries with fewer resources. Consequently, an OA journal for readers may in reality be a closed-access journal for authors.

Toward Open Access: It Takes a “Village”

ABSTRACT Academics and librarians have worked in tandem for many years to broaden access to the scholarship they create, scrutinize, collect, and consume. Recent developments have focused on campus faculty advocating for change by developing self-imposed open access policies. Such policy developments have occurred in an evolutionary process, the beginnings of which might be identified as the “serials crisis” peaking in the 1990s, followed by the focus on efforts to examine and reform broken aspects of the system of scholarly communication, and most recently the feasibility of faculty-initiated open access policies on university campuses. This article provides an analysis of one universitys 10- year evolution to an open access policy focusing primarily on its advocates’ lessons learned and the librarys role in order to add the perspective of a public institutions experience.

Campus Open Access Funds: Experiences of the KU “One University” Open Access Author Fund

INTRODUCTION In the summer of 2012, librarians from the Lawrence and Kansas City campuses of the University of Kansas (KU) proposed the creation of a KU “One University” Open Access Fund (OA Author Fund) to support open access publishing for its faculty, students, and staff. KU is a major public research and teaching institution of 28,000 students and 2,600 faculty on five campuses (Lawrence, Kansas City, Overland Park, Wichita, and Salina) ( http://ku.edu/about ), and has been a leader in open access initiatives for many years. A working group of librarians came together to create and implement a pilot project to explore the administration and impact of an open access publishing fund on KU authors, and the fund was launched in October 2012. DESCRIPTION OF PROJECT This report documents the group’s experience in developing eligibility criteria and administering the OA Fund. Here we provide insight into our efforts implementing the project, funding results, and plans for continuation. We share the results of the first two years of the OA Author Fund pilot and the lessons learned about open access fund administration. NEXT STEPS At the close of the pilot in May 2014, the OA fund review team solicited feedback from a faculty advisory group regarding grant recipients, allocation of funds by discipline, and the application process. Based on our findings, we revised eligibility criteria to create a more equitable funding opportunity for the second pilot. The fund was re-launched using these new criteria in Fall of 2014.

Subsidizing Truly Open Access

Comment on “Sensitivity of seaf oor bathymetry to climate-driven f uctuations in mid-ocean ridge magma supply” Peter Huybers, Charles Langmuir, Richard F. Katz, David Ferguson, Cristian Proistosescu, Suzanne Carbotte Olive et al. (Reports, 16 October 2015, p. 310) argue that ~10% fl uctuations in melt supply do not produce appreciable changes in ocean ridge bathymetry on time scales less than 100,000 years and thus cannot refl ect sea level forcing. Spectral analysis of bathymetry in a region they highlight as being fault controlled, however, shows strong evidence for a signal from sea level variation. Full text at http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.