Open Access News

Preston McAfee is the latest SPARC Innovator.  See today's announcement from SPARC:

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has named economics scholar and author R. Preston McAfee the newest SPARC innovator for his pioneering contributions to the Open Educational Resources movement and passionate advocacy for Open Access.

McAfee is the J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Business, Economics and Management at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and is currently working as a vice president and research fellow at Yahoo! Inc.

In 2006, McAfee was the first to publish a complete textbook, Introduction to Economic Analysis, and make it openly available online. As “open source” material, available under a Creative Commons license that requires attribution, users can pick and choose chapters or integrate with their own material. McAfee’s book, which has been updated three times since it was first introduced, is currently used on campuses from Harvard to New York University....

Organizations that lobby for reasonable textbook pricing, such as Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), are hailing McAfee’s book as a break-through. “He’s the first who understands what an open text book needs to be. He’s provided an example that everyone should follow,” says Nicole Allen, leader of the Student PIRGs’ Make Textbooks Affordable Campaign....

As a proponent of Open Educational Resources, McAfee hopes that other educators will provide more free content online – but, he realizes for many, it is hard to pass up the payment from publishers. McAfee would like to see universities host competitions for scholars to write the best online textbook and then give the winner a substantial cash prize. This would satisfy the author’s need for compensation and provide the university with an online textbook to share with students at a much more reasonable price.

In addition to his work with textbooks, McAfee has illuminated the problem of rising journal prices and been a tireless advocate of Open Access.  In 2005, along with Ted Bergstrom of the University of California at Santa Barbara, McAfee helped build a Web site [Journal Cost-Effectiveness] to allow users to compare journal prices in detail....

From SPARC's longer profile of McAfee:

“I’m not in it for the money. I’m in it to change the world,” says [McAffee]....

“Knowledge that is created, but not looked at, is not useful,” he says. McAfee contends that universities are too focused on the creation of knowledge without paying enough attention to an equally important mission of dissemination....

Now, the OER movement is in “herding cats mode” with lots different efforts being launched but not a lot of coordination, contends McAfee. There are too many people wanting to organize the movement, but not enough people willing to supply the content....

Working on the library committee at Caltech since his arrival in 2004, University Librarian Kimberly Douglas says McAfee has been a force for Open Access. “Preston stands out as not being willing to give up,” says Douglas. “That’s what it takes. This is not an easy transition. There are a lot of stakeholders for the status quo.” Douglas says McAfee has had a big impact in the field because of his energy level and the authority he brings to the issue as a faculty member, author and economist....

On the journal pricing front, McAfee worked with Ted Bergstrom of the University of California at Santa Barbara to build a Web site that is a one-stop shop on journal pricing and value.

“The light bulb went off in my head when I was doing a literature search – not at the library, but from home,” recalls McAfee of his early commitment to Open Access. “I paid $30 for an article to download and it was completely idiotic. I had spent $30 and had nothing to show for it. It was a scam and that woke me up.” ...

On www.journalprices.com a plethora of information is compiled including journal title, publisher, ISSN, subject, profit status, year first published, price per article, price per citation and composite price index. The site was launched in 2005 with 5,000 journals and updated in 2007 and again in 2008, bringing the total to 7,000.

McAfee and Bergstrom wrote an open letter to university presidents and provosts concerning increasingly expensive journals in 2006 and mailed to about 150 universities. They received lots of response from university librarians, some from a few provosts, but none from presidents. They argued that the large for-profit publishers are gouging the academic community for as much as the market will bear. So far, universities have failed to use one of the most powerful tools that they possess: charging for their valuable inputs. McAfee and Bergstrom recommend that universities assess overhead charges for the support services of editors working for expensive journals and university libraries should refrain from buying bundled packages from large commercial publishers.

In the meantime, universities can promote Open Access with digital repositories and encouraging faculty to help them post articles on their on our Web sites, says McAfee. “Universities, in my view, are in the creation of knowledge business, but also the dissemination of knowledge. The real bottleneck is not the creation, but the dissemination,” he says. “We ought to be in both businesses. Right now the crying need is to disseminate.”

McAfee says the United States is rich because of knowledge more than resources and that the country’s success is tied to distributing that knowledge. “I think this is a solvable problem,” he says. “The Web has made knowledge free. We have the content. What’s pathetic is that we aren’t talking about rocket science. We know how to get the information out there.” ...

PS:  Congratulations, Preston!