Harvard vs. Yale: Open-Access Publishing Edition - Atlantic Mobile

“Earlier this month, a special council to the Harvard library system sent a note to the school's entire faculty encouraging a broad range of measures to support open access journals, which are free and freely available. ‘Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive,’ they wrote. Perhaps the strongest recommendation was that faculty should ‘consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs.’ This would, in effect, ‘move prestige to open access,’ and away from the traditional, paid publications. Earlier this week, Yale university student, Emmanuel Quartey, posted a video interview with the school's librarian, Susan Gibbons, in which he asked her about open-access publishing. Her response was far more ambivalent than the Harvard faculty council's. Though she noted that open-access journals are more accessible, she worried that asking younger faculty to publish in open-access (presumably less prestigious) journals could jeopardize their chances to attain tenure. In essence, prestige would stay put but tenure would move away from younger Yale professors. So, the library would continue to support both open and closed-access journals. You can read her full answer below or check out the video interview above. Earlier this week, Yale university student, Emmanuel Quartey, posted a video interview with the school's librarian, Susan Gibbons, in which he asked her about open-access publishing. Her response was far more ambivalent than the Harvard faculty council's. Though she noted that open-access journals are more accessible, she worried that asking younger faculty to publish in open-access (presumably less prestigious) journals could jeopardize their chances to attain tenure. In essence, prestige would stay put but tenure would move away from younger Yale professors. So, the library would continue to support both open and closed-access journals. You can read her full answer below or check out the video interview above. ‘Open access is a very complicated topic. On the one hand, from a faculty member or researcher's perspective, they go through all this work to make a discovery, to write about it. You'd want the broadest possible audience for your article or your book. You want people to read what it is you've discovered. So on the one hand, you want the greatest possible audience. On the other hand, if you think about the tenure process, how do you get tenure? You get tenure by, in part, publishing in the best journals. And until those journals are interested in an open access model, which really takes away their revenue stream, we have this tension going on... So, sometimes what you'll see is some of the junior faculty who are less inclined to publish in open access journals because they are focused on the career path and tenure track process. But once they get tenure, they feel like they have more freedom in participating in the open access movements going around. So it's not just a scholarship issue. It's not just an issue between libraries and publishers. There is a whole other element to it that often people forget about: which is that the tenure process is tightly intertwined with the promotion process and publishing. Until that gets settled out, it isn't clear what is the best way to go... So from the library's perspective, we support both kinds of journals. We subscribe to those that still require payment but if there are open access journals, we'll make sure they are in the Orbis catalog as well. We don't have the mechanisms to preserve those open access journals that are out there on the web unless we downloaded every article, printed it, and bound the journal we don't have that archival copy, which is something that we're also very concerned about. There are a lot of issues at play here. I think too often people think of this in the dichotomy of pro-open access or against it. I think there are subtleties in the middle that need to be explored more.”