CU-Boulder students, others lobby for free access to research - Boulder Daily Camera
abernard102@gmail.com 2013-10-20
Summary:
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 ..."