Faye Chadwell, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Content Management at Oregon State University, and Jennifer McLennan, Director of Communications for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), teamed up to discuss open access and ways that libraries and librarians can advocate for free and permanent access to research.  The timing for this session was fortuitous, as October 19-23 was Open Access Week (http://www.openaccessweek.org/). 

Open access is the principle that research results should be freely available on the Internet immediately upon publication.  Open access allows for more connections to be made between ideas, and for more progress to be made in research.  Libraries can provide users with more of what they need.  Researchers have more avenues for discovery of others’ work and more reach and impact for their own work.  Colleges and universities are aided in achieving their core mission of education and research.

Chadwell and McLennan highlighted four paths to reaching open access.  First, open access journals (now over 4000) put submitted articles through peer review and then make the accepted articles freely available;  the cost of producing each journal is covered through means other than subscription costs, such as submission fees or institutional sponsorship.  Second, open access archives, often associated with institutions or disciplines and with over 1500 in existence, do not perform peer review, but do make archived materials accessible to the world.  Third, authors publishing in venues other than open access journals can sometimes negotiate, through amended copyright transfer agreements (see also Chadwell and McLennan’s second session, “Rights Stuff”) to keep the rights to their own work and distribute it freely.  Finally, funding organizations can require as a matter of policy that results of sponsored research be made freely available.

The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA, S.1373) would, if passed, require U.S. federal agencies and departments with budgets of more than $100 million to implement policies mandating higher levels of public access.  Journal articles reporting on research funded by grants from these agencies, or written by researchers employed by these agencies, would be affected.  FRPAA would require that such results published in peer-reviewed journals be made freely available to the public within six months of initial publication. The National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy are examples of the agencies that would be affected.

Ways that librarians can support open access include writing in support of the Federal Research Public Access Act, joining SPARC, and joining (for free!) the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/), a coalition of organizations and individuals supporting open public access to taxpayer-funded research.  Librarians can also inform their institutions and colleagues about the goals of open access and the ways to increase open access to research. 

Report and photo by Kris Stacy-Bates