Open Access News

... As a major center of research, Columbia should be in the vanguard of this movement. Our library system has an annual budget of more than $20 million—one of the largest in the country—yet still struggles to maintain subscriptions to increasingly expensive periodicals. With the average price of periodicals up 200 percent in the past two decades, this “serials crisis” is threatening libraries across the world. ...

At this crucial point, Columbia must join other American universities and stand up for its academic interests by supporting open access. ...

At Columbia there have been a number of efforts to make University-affiliated research available to the general public. In acknowledgement of the changing publishing landscape, the University Senate released a statement in 2005 urging the University community to “advance new models for scholarly publishing that will promote open access, helping to reshape the marketplace in which scholarly ideas circulate... [while] remaining alert to efforts by publishers to impose barriers on access to the fruits of scholarly research.”

Since then, Columbia University Libraries has strived to draw attention to the advantages of open access. The Libraries’ Scholarly Communication Program has been hosting a lecture series titled “Research without Borders” about the influence of open-access policies on research, information science, and libraries, and has been working with on-campus journals to discuss publishing possibilities for student journals.

Kenny Crews, director of the Libraries’ Copyright Advisory Office, believes that the libraries have “a core mission of facilitating access to information. In that spirit, we need to foster the creation of easily accessible resources.”

One such resource is Columbia’s Academic Commons, a repository hosted by the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. This repository could change the way Columbia’s scholars work, but Columbia’s lack of a comprehensive open-access policy means the commons must solicit submissions from individual faculty members, limiting its scope. Doctoral dissertations— which represent a substantial amount of research—are currently hosted through the ProQuest database, rendering a profusion of University-funded scholarship inaccessible to non-subscribers.

Rebecca Kennison, the director of CDRS, writes in an e-mail that Columbia could clarify its support for open-access publication by earmarking funds “explicitly to support publication, as some of our peer institutions have done.” Because open-access journals often require publication fees, University funding would help support researchers who want to publish open access. Under a model offered by Davidson, the University could provide grants “to support publishing costs for a given number of researchers per year.” A competitive grant program would add prestige to open-access publication, and affirm that the University values making its research available.

After the strong precedents set by Harvard and MIT, a serious commitment from Columbia would further the growth of open access. Indeed, if the trend in academic publication continues toward greater openness, institutions without such policies may be seen as antagonistic to the academic community. ...