A Personal Open Access Plan

“Watching the momentum swirl in academia in response to RWA and the increasing verbal acknowledgement by faculty that the closed access publishing system isn’t working has been exciting.  I’ve talked to a number of students and faculty who are very interested in what’s happening. The students, particularly, are horrified at the status quo... Thinking about this and the efforts at Cost of Knowledge and the blog posts of very smart colleagues, an idea started forming in my head that I wanted to share with you... I am making a public commitment to try to get tenure at UIC only publishing in Open Access journals....I’m at a R1 institution and a huge portion of my tenure evaluation is my ability to publish. I’m absolutely in a publish or perish situation for the next four years... There are a number of new(er) peer reviewed OA journals in the library field that will be good fits for me. Most of the ALA Journals have gone OA. I have friends and colleagues who have expressed interest in writing with me and who think finding an OA journal sounds fantastic... The faculty at my library approved an Open Access Policy (not linked on our website yet) that I’ve mentioned before... Newer journals have emerged and I think we’ll see their traditional impact factor as well as alt-metric power rise as people make use of freely available information. And I’d much rather give OA journals what few hours I do have to edit and review... I haven’t looked through all of our tenured/tenure track faculty, but I think this will be a first for my library...”