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The Daily Beacon 

Fund for open access publishing offers opportunities for faculty

Olivia Smithscott - Staff Writer

2009-02-16 22:19:53

A new fund sponsored by the Office of Research and the University Libraries is intended to encourage and assist publishing in open access journals, according to their Web site.

Open access publishing is a developing �model for the communication of research and scholarship,� the Web site says, serving as a digital repository for scholarly materials to be freely accessed with no cost to the receiver for the information.

Open access publishing, an alternative to the more expensive commercial publishing commonly used for academic publication, also seeks to cut down on the costs to academic institutions, which often pay large amounts of money to receive access to these scholarly journals. Linda Phillips, head of scholarly communication, said that the current system is a rather costly one.

�The university pays twice for journal articles,� Phillips said. �We pay faculty to write articles, and then we pay high prices for subscriptions to the journals where they�re published.�

The fund, which was founded in the fall semester of last year, provides money to faculty and graduate students wishing to publish in an open access journal. According to the Web site, the open access publishers charge money to the authors rather than the readers to cover the costs of publishing.

The money for the fund comes from an opportunities fund used for the pursuit of various research and scholarly opportunities, said Gregory Reed, vice chancellor for research administration. The Open Access Fund, at the moment, contains $20,000 for assistance.

Another huge advantage, besides considerable financial savings, Phillips said, is that the author may keep the copyright of their material, so they aren�t selling their work to someone else and are then able to publish in more than one place.

Phillips said the need for such an alternative system stems from a trend in commercial publishing over the past 30 years: an inelastic demand and the hike of subscription fees, due to the lack of competition.

�Some commercial publishers realized they could make a lot of money by increasing the prices of their journals because there�s no competition,� Phillips said. �And when faculty choose where they want to publish, they pick the journal title that is most prestigious, and often it�s the commercial title that carries the most prestige because the publisher has the resources to put into it.�

Recently, Phillips said, due to ever-increasing subscription fees sometimes numbering around $10,000 a month, the scholarly community has begun to seek out better ways of sharing their research.

�We as faculty are required to publish as a part of our job, and the reason that we publish is not to make money. It is to disseminate the results of our research,� she said. �If we�re going to disseminate the results of our research, why should somebody else make money off of it? We said, �What if we published in journals that said they were going to cover the costs in some way other than through subscriptions?��

Phillips said another issue with these commercial scholarly publications is that much of the content is determined by the publisher rather than a peer evaluator.

�Because these certain journals developed really great reputations, effectively, the publisher is the one making decisions about the quality rather than the discipline,� she said. �It�s like the publisher is controlling the peer review process, not the scholarly society.�

Although open access seems to be a promising new frontier, one problem with the open access route, said Reed, is that it may take awhile for it to reach the respectability and prominence of the commercial publications. Reed concluded that several factors would contribute to an improved reputation for open access.

�First of all they�ll have to have some sort of review or approval process that insures that peers will deem it as being reliable,� he said. �If anybody can post anything, then it�s not reliable. The next step would be for faculty in general to recognize it as being a peer quality review. In the final analysis, that�s where the journals got their success.�

So far, Reed said, there hasn�t been as much interest as expected in the fund, with very few applications for assistance being submitted. But Reed attributes this to caution and unfamiliarity with the new system on the part of authors.

Despite the slow response, Phillips cited Ralf Schimmer in The Chronicle of Higher Education for his promising evaluation of how relevant open access will become in time.

�I call it the logical next step, to move beyond the repository and subscription model scheme,� Schimmer said. �Open access is an inevitable, unstoppable and irreversible development.�

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