Flipping Journals, Changing Ways of Publishing

"As a reference librarian, I’m keenly following developments in the Open Access (OA) movement, because I (along with all of you folks also working with researchers) am aware of how journal and serial costs have gotten so large and burdensome to libraries that titles must be cut, and thus access to important research is becoming ever more difficult for students, faculty, and other scholars around the world. So I was intrigued when I saw last June that Harvard Library’s Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC) had awarded a contract to three individuals —David Solomon, Bo-Christer Björk, and Mikael Laakso—to “write a comprehensive literature review on methods for converting subscription-based scholarly journals to open access.” The OSC calls this the “journal flipping project.” When I heard that the preliminary version of their report, Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences, was available for public comment, I took a look at what it says. It’s exciting, in part because it’s realistic. The best thing about it to me is that it points the way forward for excellent research to be shared much more broadly with other researchers who can benefit from it. The benefits to libraries are pretty obvious: taking the strain off library budgets while enabling librarians to assist researchers in getting access to the best possible research in their fields. I also got in touch with Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Library Office of Scholarly Communication, to get some of the context for the “journal flipping” report (for background about Peter and OA in the library context please see my Interview with Peter Suber on Open Access, from September 30, 2015). Here’s what Peter told me about the report: ..."