...The first three hours of the [ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication] were powerful and shifted my and my team’s thinking and perspectives. After a brief introduction to the process of creating a program plan for our local campuses, Lee Van Orsdel, Dean of University Libraries, Grand Valley State University, introduced a lively exploration of advocacy. After Van Orsdel offered several strategies for working with faculty on their own turf addressing their issues, she moved us into an active learning mode. Each team created a sound bite or "elevator speech" tailored to faculty addressing a scholarly communication issue on our campus. Then we shared our sound bites with the group and asked the faculty present if the sound bites resonated with them.
This was the first of the most compelling moments in the entire institute. The faculty present spoke openly and candidly about scholarly communication and its impact on their professional careers and ways of conducting their work. While not always agreeing with one another, our faculty participants offered their own perceptions. We heard views such as the following: Faculty will share their own work—despite any copyright agreement they signed with the publisher. They understand that open access material is freely available, but it is not free of costs. Where their work is published and who sees it is of primary importance. They don’t care whether or not large numbers of people have access to it but they do want to insure that key scholars in their field have access to it. Local repositories do not enable other scholars in their field to gain access to their work as well as a discipline-specific national repository could. The importance of publishing in the top five journals in their field could not be overstated—it matters throughout their careers, even post-tenure, because the prestige gained affects their ability to obtain grant funding, subsequent publishing and future job opportunities, and even defines who their colleagues are....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/22/2006 01:15:00 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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
