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The Open Access Imperative

By Katharine Dunn, Dean's Editorial Fellow


These days, most academic librarians in research institutions will at some point encounter open access (OA) in their work. But that doesn’t mean they’ll understand it. OA has a two-decade history with many players and concerns, and it can be overwhelming to navigate even the basics of it. This month, we offer an introduction to open access as well as some resources for students and librarians interested in learning about it.

For seven years starting in the early 1980s, Robin Peek worked as a medical librarian at Portland Community College Health Sciences Center in Oregon, where she often saw patrons looking for information about an illness their spouse or child had. “People wanted to know whether doctors were doing research in a particular hospital because maybe they could visit it,” says Peek, now an associate professor at GSLIS. “They wanted to feel they had some control.” Peek’s collection was small, so she sometimes sent them to a nearby health sciences university library to find scholarly journals publishing studies relevant to their concerns. But she soon learned that the library “didn’t see it as a charge of theirs to help the general public,” she says, and patrons were left empty handed and without much recourse: It was the print era, and they didn’t have the Web to turn to.

Things changed quickly. By the late 80s, Peek had become interested in computing and the early Internet forum UseNet, and she began to wonder about the possibilities of exchanging content, like medical research articles, using the new technology. She set off to graduate school at Syracuse to explore the issue in depth. (Her Ph.D. dissertation looked at social scientists and humanities professors’ use of electronic mailing lists.) Peek wasn’t alone. Throughout the ’80s and early ’90s, scientists, government agencies, and librarians around the world were playing with new technologies, creating digital, peer-reviewed journals or data archives that were accessible at first via disk or CD-ROM, then file transfer protocol (FTP) and e-mail, and finally the Web, which launched in 1991. That year, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory started the Internet’s first “preprint” server called the Arxiv, where physicists specializing in high energy could post their articles before they were accepted for publication. For the first time in the history of publishing, it was now technologically possible to easily share scholarly (and other) writing and data. Many librarians and researchers came to believe that opening access to academic work was also the right thing to do.

Librarians’ perspective

Libraries have long managed and paid for academic journals, and doing so pulls them into a rather strange corner of the publishing world. In scholarly journal publishing, there is little competition among titles because researchers have to publish in certain prestige journals that will help them secure promotions and tenure. Journals thus often have a monopoly over their subject areas. Beyond this, publishers pay neither for producing the work described in articles (universities, federal agencies, and private funders do) nor for the peerreview process, which is essential to legitimize the journal and is done by scholar volunteers as a service to their academic community. The kicker is that publishers have traditionally asked faculty members to sign over their copyright, and faculty have felt obliged to do so to get their articles published. In doing so, faculty lose most or all legal rights to reuse, distribute, and even sometimes access their own work.

As a result, commercial scholarly publishers in particular stand to make a lot of money, and they have. Between 1986 and 2003, the price per subscription of serials in the United States rose by 215%, while the Consumer Price Index increased only 68% during that time. Publishers have also merged with and acquired others, which has led to an increase in subscription prices. In 2009, 37 publishers were controlled by just six larger companies.

The highest-price journals are in science, technology, and medicine, which is part of the reason the initial focus of the open access movement has been in these fields.

Over the past three decades, academic libraries have found it increasingly difficult to pay for their subscriptions. This is troubling for students and researchers, who need to access journals, and for librarians, whose mandate it has always been to make information accessible to anyone who wants and needs it. “I had been in the serials realm for so long that it wasn’t hard to see something was broken,” says Ellen Duranceau ’85LS, now the program manager of scholarly publishing and licensing at MIT. To Duranceau and many other librarians, the Web presented an opportunity to make much-needed reforms to scholarly publishing.

Government mandates and institutional repositories Major reforms have come from the government, which in recent years has been swayed by a compelling argument in favor of taxpayer access. American taxpayers pay tens of billions of dollars a year to researchers through government agencies, according to the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of patient groups, physicians, researchers, and publishers. Work funded by the government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) alone results in more than 65,000 articles annually. So, the argument goes, why should the public have to pay for research twice — first with their taxes and second with subscription fees for journal articles? Many members of the public, like the patrons Peek saw years ago, are unable to view those articles if they don’t have access to a library.

In late 2007, President George W. Bush signed a bill that requires the NIH to make the research it pays for open. Researchers must now submit NIH-funded manuscripts to the NIH’s PubMed Central database once they’re accepted by a peerreviewed journal, and the articles are made publicly available after 12 months. More recently, a bill called the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) is now before Congress. FRPAA would expand the NIH mandate to 11 other federal funding agencies and require that articles be freely available online six months after publication.

Taxpayer access goes beyond legal rights, says Peek, who has written a column for the industry magazine Information Today on scholarly publishing and OA issues since 1997. For her it is a moral imperative. “It’s completely arrogant to think that the cure for breast cancer won’t be discovered by a researcher in Turkey” who may not be able to view key articles in her field, she says. “Even in the United States we have access problems: people who are in private practices or not affiliated with hospitals that subscribe to journals.

I remember as a librarian interacting with people in the medical field and them saying the Internet is full of trash information. I’d think, ‘If you want people to get good information, then why don’t you give me the good information? People have already paid for it.’”

While the U.S. government begins to make nationwide reforms, faculty and librarians at universities are doing their part to open access to research. Harvard was the first major school to make a change. In early 2008, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy to post faculty articles to the university institutional repository (IR), a digital archive open to the world. Other universities have since followed suit. At MIT, for example, the institute’s entire faculty unanimously voted in March 2009 to publish their scholarly articles on their freely available IR, making it the first university in the country to do so. In the months leading up to the vote, Duranceau provided support to the faculty committee pushing for open access, which meant she went to all committee meetings, did background research, and prepared slides and FAQs. “It was tremendously rewarding to be a fly on the wall during that process,” says Duranceau, who now oversees MIT’s implementation of the OA policy. “It was like being part of history. I’ve never had that opportunity before.” There are now about 20 faculty-led departmental or institution-wide mandates like Harvard’s and MIT’s at universities across the country.

Open access is certainly good for librarians’ professional ethics, but it may also be a boon employment-wise. As more and more universities and funding agencies adopt OA policies, librarians will be needed to support researchers as they figure out how to comply. “Scholars don’t want to be worrying about copyright, version controls, search terms, or database structures,” says Peek. “If you look at the people who are the best qualified for the mechanics, advocacy, and direction, if they’re willing to do it, it’s the librarians. No one argues that. It is a growth area for the field.”

Open Access Resources

When librarians and others talk about open access, they’re usually referring to access to academic literature, peer-reviewed articles published by researchers at universities or other institutions. This kind of work is always “royalty free,” which means that authors don’t make money when they publish, and nor do they expect to — a key distinction from music, books, and articles that are produced for, among other reasons, a paycheck. (No one is forcing open access on people who make a living from their work.) According to the first and most famous definition of open access, which came out of a meeting in Budapest in 2001, for access to truly be open to scholarly works, permission and price barriers must be removed. Permission barriers include copyright (which authors have traditionally signed away) or licensing restrictions. Price barriers include subscription and licensing fees.

Scholars, librarians, and research funders are supporting open access through policies that mandate archiving articles in repositories (see feature). But this isn’t the only way open access happens. Publishers themselves are getting involved. Many traditional publishers now offer open access to select articles if an author or institution pays a fee or if the article is embargoed for a certain period. And there is an increasing number of fully OA journals, many of which were born that way. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals, there are more than 5,100 OA journals in the world.

Want to get involved in the OA movement? The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an alliance of libraries founded by the Association of Research Libraries, is a good place to start. SPARC has resources for students on “the right to research” (http://www.arl.org/sparc/students/), for librarians on how to engage students in open access (http:// www.arl.org/sparc/students3/forlibraries.shtml), and general OA background resources (http://www.arl.org/sparc/openaccess/).

Other useful resources:

  • Peter Suber, an OA strategist, Berkman Fellow at Harvard, and senior researcher at SPARC, writes clearly about OA in the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, which you can subscribe to here: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/ archive.htm Suber’s website also has a great overview of OA (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm)
  • Simmons GSLIS hosts the comprehensive and extremely useful Open Access Directory (http://oad.simmons.edu/ oadwiki/Main_Page), which includes lists of links about OA journals, events, jobs, repositories, etc. The list is curated and edited by GSLIS faculty member Robin Peek, among others, and is overseen by an editorial board that includes Peter Suber and the executive director of SPARC.
  • The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has put together a Scholarly Communication Toolkit (http:// www.acrl.ala.org/scholcomm/ ), with background information on authors’ rights, journal economics, and what librarians can do to promote open access.
  • Simmons GSLIS students celebrate Open Access Week each October, and this is the fourth year for the international event whose aim is to spread the word about open access. Learn more here: http://www.openaccessweek.org/