Project Information Literacy: Smart Talks

An interview with Peter Suber. Excerpt: "I began to feel that OA was to conventional publication roughly what conventional publication was to handwritten correspondence....Individual scholars can make their own work OA by making it gold or green. Funding agencies and universities wanting their grantees and faculty to make their work OA almost universally mandate green OA. One reason is that green OA is compatible with author freedom to submit to their journals of their choice. In addition, green OA costs less than gold OA, scales better, and is compatible with any later efforts to add incentives or funding for gold OA....Faculty who hear about university OA mandates sometimes imagine that faculty have been coerced by administrative edicts. But the vast majority of university OA policies have been adopted by faculty themselves, at their own initiative, and more than 40 have been adopted by unanimous faculty votes. For institutions considering a policy, I can recommend the guide to good practices for university OA policies that I maintain with Stuart Shieber....For the purpose of educating stakeholders, the bad news is that OA is like any other subject, such as the Battle of Eylau or biological evolution. The simplest understanding of it doesn't answer objections very well, and more robust understanding takes a little study. The good news is that OA is much easier than the Battle of Eylau or biological evolution, and that only a little study or background is needed to answer objections and misunderstandings...."