A Journey to Open Access – Part 2 | Tony Hey on eScience

"University Deans are required to do many things for their university, including taking some responsibility for the research output of their Faculty. Each year, capturing all forms of research deliverables – journal papers, technical reports, conference and workshop proceedings, presentations and Doctorate and Masters theses – is a necessary and important chore. This is especially important in the UK – where the research funds allocated to each department by the Government are explicitly linked to the quality of its research over a four or five year period. First as Chair of the Electronics and Computer Science Department, and then as Dean of Engineering at the University of Southampton, I was responsible for two of these ‘Research Assessment’ cycles in the UK. It was during the preparation of these research returns that I encountered an interesting problem: the University library could no longer afford to subscribe to all the journals in which our 200 engineering faculty members – plus a similar number of postdocs and graduate students – chose to publish. This meant that just assembling the published copies of all the publications of all research staff and students became a much less straightforward exercise. The reason for this problem is well-known to librarians – it is the so-called ‘serials crisis’.  This crisis is dramatically illustrated below in a graph that shows the relative growth of serial expenditures at ARL Libraries versus the consumer price index over the past twenty-five years...