MSU News - MSU Faculty Senate passes statement encouraging unrestricted access to scholarly research

"The Montana State University Faculty Senate recently passed a statement of support encouraging scholarly publication in open access journals, when possible. Open access journals provide unrestricted online access to peer-reviewed scholarly research. In the traditional model, publishers own the rights to articles in their journals, and anyone who wants to read the articles must pay to access them, explained Kenning Arlitsch, dean of the MSU Library. Arlitsch said the majority of the library’s budget is currently devoted to paying for commercial journal subscriptions for the MSU community, even though most of the research was funded by taxpayers, and articles were written and reviewed by faculty. The Faculty Senate’s statement notes that open access “increases the impact of research conducted at MSU, thus furthering the spread of new knowledge, not only for our students and affiliates, but for all those who value the pursuit of learning and innovation.” MSU publishes about 15 scholarly journal articles per week across all disciplines, said Leila Sterman, scholarly communication librarian. She added that encouraging publication in open access journals is a growing trend among universities in the United States. People who would like to read open access articles by MSU scholars may do so by visiting ScholarWorks, MSU’s open access institutional repository managed by the library, at http://scholarworks.montana.edu/. ..."