Sunday, July 5, 2009
The University of Kansas has become the first public university in the U.S. to adopt an “open access” policy that allows professors’ scholarly journal articles to be available for free online.
The approved policy joins the University with Stanford, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which also have open access policies.
Open access at the University was proposed by a group of faculty members led by Andrew Peterson, evolutionary biologist and professor of ecology and evolutinary biology, who wanted his students to have access to primary research literature. He said that before open access, students could access research articles only on the University campus network because the libraries were paying for subscriptions to scholarly journals.
“A lot of academics around the world are getting frustrated and worried about how commercial scientific research publication has become,” Peterson said. “That is, if you want to access a publication in a scientific journal, chances are that you, or your university, will have to pony up a nice fat payment to get that access.”
SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, helped to coordinate a petition across the U.S., calling on universities and researchers to support open access policies such as the one the University adopted. In the association’s petition statement, it said that students relied on access to academic journals for education and research, but that many colleges struggled with the high costs of subscriptions.
Rebecca Smith, director of library communications and advancement, said that from a budgetary standpoint, the library was responsible for providing access to scholarly journals across a number of fields to support the teaching, research and learning of the entire campus.
“It is becoming more and more cost prohibitive,whether electronically or in paper form, a cost that grows in a rate that far outpaces inflation,” Smith said. “This policy, is in a sense the grass-root effort to deal with the burgeoning cost of access to scholarly communications.”
Under the open access policy, articles produced by University faculty will be filed as digital copies in KU ScholarWorks, a free database created in 2005 that already houses and preserves more than 4,400 articles. The articles are available for free to anyone around the world.
Ada Emmett, associate librarian for scholarly communications, said that when professors wanted their research to be published, they typically gave up all their copyrights and allowed the commercial journals to sell the access to research articles. The commercial journals then made a profit from those published research articles. Emmett said faculty were not compensated and neither was the University, which funded the faculty’s research.
“It’s an old system that isn’t working for today,” Emmett said. “The University is paying to view articles of research that its own professor conducted. When a professor gives the articles to a publisher for free, the publisher is making profit by selling it back to my institution.”
Emmett said the new policy would allow professors to retain some of their copyrights, which in turn would allow them to submit a copy of their research to the University scholarly archives, where it would be available for free to everyone. However, a professor could also give some of those copyrights to a scholarly journal that could still publish the article for paying subscribers. This way both students and faculty could benefit from a parallel system.
Emmett said that since the policy was approved, Oregon and Kansas State universities had approached the University because they were intrigued by the movement. She said she expected more institutions to follow.
“It will have a ripple effect,” Emmett said. “KU has been on the cutting edge of reform in open access and scholarly communications for over 10 years, so people look to KU as a public research university to see what we’re doing.”
Peterson said academia was not about profit, so the idea of limiting readership to those who paid journal subscriptions started to irritate him. He said that from his perspective, these limits were the seed that started it all.
“My hope is to see much greater visibility and citation of KU scholarship,” Peterson said. “If we can remove the barriers to access, then many more people around the world can read and contemplate what we do.”
— — Edited by Adam Schoof
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