GUEST COLUMN: Sharing the Fruits of Our Labor | The Sun

"In the last year, Cornell faculty have published discoveries that could transform our ability to treat muscular dystrophy, power the state of New York without fossil fuels and grow crops without dangerous salmonella.But the key to taking these discoveries, beyond just intellectual curiosities, is getting this information in the right hands. The problem is that unless you are at a large research university or are willing to pay the $35 for a typical article, you can’t access most of the work published in academic journals. Who are we to think it will be someone with an institution’s journal subscription that will build on our cutting edge research?  Crowdsourcing has certainly taught us otherwise. 33 universities in the U.S. — including Harvard, MIT and all ten campuses of the University of California — have created digital repositories that make scholarly work published by their faculty freely available to the rest of the world, regardless of funding source. We think Cornell should do the same. Not only is it in our mission, but an institutional open-access policy is also a logical extension of existing efforts at Cornell. A pilot program funded by the Library and the Provost’s office, for example, will pay the fees (typically $1,500) to publish in open-access journals when other funding is not available. And physics professor Paul Ginsparg ’81 PhD created arXiv.org, an open-access, electronic pre-print server that is the go-to for sharing research findings in physics and math, hosting almost 900,000 articles ..."