Library celebrates open access
This week, librarians at USU are celebrating a trend which is changing the way scientists and researchers spread their findings.
Open Access Week, which started on Monday, was planned to help researchers and the public understand the ways electronic publishing is changing scholarly journals, according to Andrew Wesolek, scholarly communication librarian at the Merrill-Cazier Library.
Wesolek said the highlight of the week will be an address by John Bollen of Indiana University and Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S and R on Tuesday at 4 p.m. in the library. Wesolek said the concept of open access encompasses more than research articles, but for Open Access week, the events focus on scholarly publications because it’s one of the most problematic areas.
Traditionally, scholarly journals have collected, reviewed and published research findings. Those journals have been the method through which professors and researchers share their work. Published articles can help a researcher find a job or secure grants to pay for future research.
“This worked just fine for 350 years, but with the rise of the Internet and digital publication and all that electronic dissemination of knowledge, we can start moving beyond those journals,” Wesolek said.
Wesolek said over the past four decades, the cost of scholarly journals has increased multiple times, and the rate of inflation and libraries can afford to subscribe to fewer journals.
“Even the most well-endowed libraries in the world simply can’t afford to purchase all of the journals,” he said. “They’re just too expensive.”
He said open access helps researchers worldwide by making the findings of other scientists available.
“They now have access to all of the information, rather than just what their libraries can afford,” Wesolek said.
Wesolek said open access is especially relevant in the developing world. Harvard, which has one of the largest research libraries in the world, subscribes to 98,000 scholarly journals. By contrast, the most well-endowed university in India can afford 10,000 journals.
Jan Sojka, the head of the physics department, said he’s had positive experiences with open access, but he’s concerned the push for open information might make unreliable research findings available. In his role as president of the Space Physics and Aeronomy section of the American Geophysical Union, Sojka said he’s had an inside view of the journal review process.
“In our journals, there is a failure rate,” Sojka said. “If the reviewers don’t like your article and can make the argument scientifically, ‘Here’s what’s wrong with it,’ the editor will agree with the reviewer and it doesn’t get published.”
Sojka said he agrees with the ideology behind open access, however. As publishing costs rise, it’s more difficult for small scholarly societies to publish journals, and open access repositories can help – as long as peer-review practices aren’t abandoned and researchers can tell how credible an article is.
USU is one of many universities that have started gathering research articles to put in their online open-access repositories, Wesolek said. Wesolek oversees USU’s Digital Commons, which now contains more than 1.1 million full-text articles as well as other materials such as conference presentations and books published by the University Press. The Digital Commons started four years ago, but about 700,000 articles were added to the repository in the last year alone.
“The goal of that initiative is to capture, preserve and promote all the research that’s conducted here at USU,” he said.
Earlier this year, USU adopted a policy designed to increase the size of the Digital Commons. When a researcher writes a scholarly article, it will be added to the Digital Commons unless otherwise specified, Wesolek said. When the article is submitted to a journal, under the policy the researcher should ask to retain publishing rights so the article can be used in the Digital Commons.
The policy was designed to cause as little inconvenience to researchers as possible while helping them to maintain access to their own work, according to Becky Thoms, a copyright librarian at USU.
Thoms said often, an author will forfeit the right to publish or distribute their own work without fully realizing it, so they can’t legally email an article to a friend or print it off for a class. If the article is in the Digital Commons, however, researchers have ready access to it.
The policy has an automatic exclusion clause, so if a journal doesn’t agree to let USU have the copyright necessary to add the article to the Digital Commons, the author can still publish the article in the journal.
“The idea is to make the author feel like they’re not standing on their own when they’re trying to negotiate with the publisher,” Thoms said.
Thoms said although users can read materials in the Digital Commons free of charge, the material isn’t public domain. USU and the authors retain the copyright of scholarly articles, the material isn’t available for users to copy or redistribute, she said.
As part of Open Access Week, Thoms will give a presentation entitled “Understanding Your Rights” on 4 p.m. Wednesday in the library. She said the presentation will be useful for professors and faculty as well as students who write and co-write scholarly articles.
– steve.kent@aggiemail.usu.edu