Richard Atkinson, A New World of Scholarly Communication, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 7, 2003 (accessible only to subscribers). Suggesting ways that universities can cope with the serials pricing crisis. Excerpt: "[Projects] like BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science in both biology and medicine, are only just emerging. Although it is too soon to know whether any of those services will significantly reduce the cost of scholarly communication or just shift the burden elsewhere, they deserve our support. We can demonstrate that support financially and by explicitly encouraging faculty members to make use of those models....Faculty members...decide which publishing organizations they will review, edit, and write for. When signing a publishing contract, they should determine whether to assign the publisher copyright and whether to seek a nonexclusive right to disseminate their work freely in an electronic form. As they do so, however, faculty members should recognize and reward colleagues who choose alternative ways to disseminate their research....Universities should shoulder the costs of developing, managing, and publicizing research --including peer review of scholarly papers-- and build the online capacity [through institutional repositories] to distribute those works worldwide. The costs, though not insignificant, pale in comparison to those that libraries must bear to buy access to our faculty members' publications." Atkinson is the former president of the University of California. (PS: It's heartening to see an important figure endorse OA journals and OA repositories in the Chronicle. But I wish he had used the phrase "open access" at least once so that readers would find it easier to follow-up his suggestions.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/03/2003 05:44:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
