Public access to research is "inevitable," but it will be a slog to get to it. That was the takeaway message of a panel on the role libraries can play in supporting current and future public-access moves. The panel was part of the program at the membership meeting of the Association of Research Libraries, held [in Washington, D.C.] yesterday and today.
"I now believe that having public access to most scholarly communications is inevitable," said David Shulenburger, vice president for academic affairs at the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. "Faculty are coming to understand, finally, that this has to happen if they're going to have the most scholarly opportunities to get things done."
Still, many scholars need the hard sell from colleagues and librarians about the benefits of open access. Lorraine J. Haricombe, dean of the University of Kansas Libraries, described the "foot soldiering" and outreach that had to be done before Kansas's faculty passed an open-access resolution earlier this year. It required some "very, very challenging conversations" with scholars worried about peer review and copyright issues, Ms. Haricombe said.
Bernard Schutz, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, in Potsdam, Germany, stressed how far the United States lags behind Europe and other parts of the world on the open-access frontier. Of the 266 signers of the Berlin Declaration, a 2003 statement endorsing open-access principles, only six are based in the United States, he said. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 10/16/2009 02:11:00 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.
