Updating the Agenda for Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communications

"In the United States and elsewhere both public and private research funders have fundamentally altered long-standing discussions about open access (OA) with their various public access or OA mandates. In the US the idea of a relatively comprehensive 'green' (local institutional repository [IR] based) OA to the scholarly journal literature through author self-archiving is now pretty much unrealistic at most institutions;1 funder (and funder-blessed disciplinary) journal article repositories will play this role, with an additional role for publisher-based initiatives like Chorus which capitalize on the fact that the most natural and useful place to provide public access for articles is going to be in the context of the venue where they were published. Funder mandates are not going to force faculty or publishers to populate institutional repositories, and in most cases institutional policies alone have so far seen very limited success; note also that these institutional policies are the only way to ensure deposit of most unfunded research (extensive in the humanities, some social sciences and other areas). Funders to date have shown little interest in enabling or mandating large-scale automatic replication from funder or funder-blessed repositories to institutional ones. It is at best unclear if institutionally-driven initiatives to automatically replicate from mandated repositories to institutional ones is likely to be either legally or technically feasible at scale, even after embargo periods have expired and articles are open for public access. Developments like SHARE and institutional research information systems (CRIS) will certainly allow automated IR population for metadata covering a growing proportion of faculty publications.

At least in the near term, much of this public access may be delayed by up to a year; though it is clear that top quality OA journals, typically funded though author fees, are now well established and flourishing. While it would be wonderful to have all faculty research published in immediate OA journals, it’s very unclear how to fund this shift,2 doi:10.5860/crl.78.2.126 Guest Editorial 127 or how to motivate faculty to do so (though certainly education and advocacy has had some genuine and steady success), and I am skeptical about our ability to 'flip' commercial journals at any scale, at least in the near term. There have certainly been many successes with scholarly societies that have decided to move to open access for some or all of their journals, which are often among the most respected in their disciplines. I suspect that we’ll see slow, gradual progress towards even more widespread journal article OA in the coming years."