CU-Boulder students, others lobby for free access to research - Boulder Daily Camera

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-10-20

Summary:

" ... This week, CU's United Government of Graduate Students and CU Libraries are hosting Open Access Week to talk about how an open access policy could benefit the campus. Every year, the university's libraries pay for thousands of research journal subscriptions so that students, faculty and staff members on campus can access them for free online. Not only are the subscriptions expensive -- they cost CU's libraries $7.7 million in 2012, about 70 percent of the total library budget -- but once students leave campus, they no longer have free access to the publications. Thomas Cech, a CU researcher and 1989 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry who will speak on an open access panel this week, remembered a time when he was traveling and wanted to consult one of his own published articles. He tried to pull up the article online and was immediately asked for a credit card number. Not such a big deal for Cech, he said, but it would deter someone in a developing country or the parent of a child with a costly disease like leukemia from reading potentially helpful research. "It's a question of should the fruits of scientific labor that have been peer reviewed and judged by the community to be worth reading, should they be broadly available to everyone or only available to those who have enough money to pay?" Cech said. "Most scientists feel they should be broadly available." When he was president of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Cech implemented his own open access policy requiring all of the institute's researchers to make their papers available free online within six months of publication. In 2008, the National Institutes of Health required scientists to make their research free and readily available within 12 months of publication on PubMed, a free online database created by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. In February, President Obama mandated that all federal agencies with research budgets over $100 million, such as the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, provide free access to studies and data within one year of publication.

If it adopted an open access policy, CU would join Harvard, MIT, the University of California and more than 100 other universities that have adopted such policies in recent years. While there's no formal proposal before the CU administration, the undergraduate and graduate student governments, as well as the Boulder Faculty Assembly, have passed resolutions voicing their support for an open access framework on campus ... Another option for researchers is to publish their work in several new open access journals, including one, Elementa, edited by Detlev Helmig, a fellow and researcher at CU's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. Open access journals ask researchers to pay a fee, often in the $2,000 to $3,000 range, when their work is published to help offset the costs of producing and maintaining the journal.  CU's libraries have created a small pilot fund to help researchers with those fees, Johnson said, and some open access journals like Elementa allow researchers to apply for a waiver of the fee if they can't afford it.  For students, one of the less obvious perks of using an open access system is that they can share an article they published or one they helped research and write via social media. If they share an article now, Johnson said, they're expecting their social media followers and friends to fork over $30 to $40 to read their work in an online journal ... Chinowsky said faculty members are also concerned about publishers' response to new open access ideals. Would publishers, he wondered, really go for the idea of the university or researcher owning the copyrights? They seem to, so far, at schools like Harvard, though they may negotiate certain conditions, such as an embargo period during which an article is not publicly available.  If a journal refuses to publish a researcher's article because of the university's open access policy, Harvard advises its faculty members to negotiate with the publisher or find a new one altogether. Some publishers oppose open access policies because they say they can't compete with a free version in an online database. The Association of American Publishers has taken the position that while taxpayers often fund the costs of conducting research, the publishers invest time and money into peer reviewing, editing, vetting, organizing and publishing the research. It can be several years before a publisher recovers costs of producing an article. Many open access policies require researchers to make their work free within six months or a year, and publishers say that's not enough time for them to make back their expenses ..."

Link:

http://www.dailycamera.com/cu-news/ci_24341715/cu-boulder-students-others-lobby-free-access-research

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.mandates oa.advocacy oa.students oa.aap oa.funders oa.fees oa.funds oa.oa_week oa.colorado.u oa.hournals oa.policies oa.journals

Date tagged:

10/20/2013, 08:29

Date published:

10/20/2013, 04:29