Library celebrates open access - USU Statesman - Utah State University

"This week, librarians at USU are celebrating a trend which is changing the way scientists and researchers spread their findings.     Open Access Week, which started on Monday, was planned to help researchers and the public understand the ways electronic publishing is changing scholarly journals, according to Andrew Wesolek, scholarly communication librarian at the Merrill-Cazier Library.     Wesolek said the highlight of the week will be an address by John Bollen of Indiana University     and Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S and R on Tuesday at 4 p.m. in the library. Wesolek said the concept of open access encompasses more than research articles, but for Open Access week, the events focus on scholarly publications because it’s one of the most problematic areas... Wesolek said over the past four decades, the cost of scholarly journals has increased multiple times, and the rate of inflation and libraries can afford to subscribe to fewer journals. 'Even the most well-endowed libraries in the world simply can’t afford to purchase all of the journals,' he said. 'They’re just too expensive...'   Wesolek said open access is especially relevant in the developing world. Harvard, which has one of the largest research libraries in the world, subscribes to 98,000 scholarly journals. By contrast, the most well-endowed university in India can afford 10,000 journals.  Jan Sojka, the head of the physics department, said he’s had positive experiences with open access, but he’s concerned the push for open information might make unreliable research findings available. In his role as president of the Space Physics and Aeronomy section of the American Geophysical Union, Sojka said he’s had an inside view of the journal review process.  'In our journals, there is a failure rate,' Sojka said. 'If the reviewers don’t like your article and can make the argument scientifically, ‘Here’s what’s wrong with it,’ the editor will agree with the reviewer and it doesn’t get published.'  Sojka said he agrees with the ideology behind open access, however. As publishing costs rise, it’s more difficult for small scholarly societies to publish journals, and open access repositories can help — as long as peer-review practices aren’t abandoned and researchers can tell how credible an article is.  USU is one of many universities that have started gathering research articles to put in their online open-access repositories, Wesolek said. Wesolek oversees USU’s Digital Commons, which now contains more than 1.1 million full-text articles as well as other materials such as conference presentations and books published by the University Press. The Digital Commons started four years ago, but about 700,000 articles were added to the repository in the last year alone.  Earlier this year, USU adopted a policy designed to increase the size of the Digital Commons. When a researcher writes a scholarly article, it will be added to the Digital Commons unless otherwise specified, Wesolek said. When the article is submitted to a journal, under the policy the researcher should ask to retain publishing rights so the article can be used in the Digital Commons..."