Schroer: The Cost of Knowledge | The Dartmouth

"Dartmouth is counted among the best universities in the world, so why is it failing to lead on one of the world’s most pressing issues? Most of our research — and most research in America — is published behind immense paywalls that keep the American public and students and scholars in developing nations from accessing the information they need. Preventive vaccines for the Ebola virus in primates were developed 14 years ago and published in Nature, an international science journal, behind a $32 access fee. Had this information been readily available to the general public after its date of publication, a human vaccine could have potentially been researched and tested prior to 2014’s Ebola crisis. The open access movement believes that if knowledge is power, then timely access to information is an issue of global justice. Open access means widespread, freely available online access to scholarly research. It might seem like we have open access at Dartmouth because when we click on 'get PDF' through the Summon system, we’re usually linked immediately to the article we want. We don’t have to pull out our ID cards and use our DASH accounts to pay for access to each article. That freedom, however, is superficial. Twenty citations in an essay can be equivalent to over $600 in scholarly resources. Dartmouth shells out massive amounts of money every year to purchase journal subscriptions and make sure you get the scholarly information you need. Unless you’re planning on attending another research institution after Dartmouth, your inexpensive access to scholarly information might end with graduation. Open access seeks to stop rising publishing fees. These fees have become so expensive that one of the richest institutions in the world — Harvard University — announced in 2012 that it could no longer afford to pay for them. If Harvard maintains the largest endowment of any American university — nearly $32.7 billion for 2013 —  and still can’t pay for scholarly information, who can? The open access movement wants to change this system by making research available to global audiences, regardless of their economic status. While groups like Open Access Nigeria have been loudly advocating the benefits of open access, Dartmouth has been whispering around its edges. Although many individual faculty and staff — especially many of our librarians — provide support for the movement, a sustained commitment to open access at the institutional level is lacking. The faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University, Harvard, and several other institutions already have open access policies that allow faculty members to retain rights to their scholarly and scientific articles before they sign these rights away to publishers. These policies allow institutions to develop open access repositories of their work, which disseminate their scholarship and encourage international access to information. There are more than 700 open access repositories in the United States. Dartmouth does not have an open access policy yet. The faculty Council on the Libraries has drafted an open access policy proposal, but it was tabled at the Nov. 2014 faculty meeting amidst objections from some faculty members ..."