Open Access Comes to CUNY | PSC CUNY
abernard102@gmail.com 2012-12-01
Summary:
"Scholarly publishing, a growing number of academics say, is broken... Harvard’s Faculty Advisory Council caused a stir last spring when it said that, in the long run, even this endowment-rich school would be unable to afford rising subscription fees for academic journals, currently costing Harvard nearly $4 million a year. With publishing companies like Elsevier posting profit margins of around 35 percent, the Harvard statement suggests that universities are paying far more than the true costs of publishing. The council urged Harvard faculty to choose to share their work in open-access journals, both as a good idea in itself and to help 'move prestige to open access.' There are signs that this shift is already underway, and not only among specialists. Studies published in PLoS ONE, the largest open-access and peer-reviewed journal of the Public Library of Science, are now routinely cited in news reports in The New York Times, The Economist, and BBC News. In recent years, another form of open-access to scholarly work known as an institutional repository (IR), has been established at a number of universities. At many universities, IRs have been up and running for several years. Harvard has DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard). The University of Kansas has ScholarWorks. The University of California has eScholarship. Some universities, such as Harvard, require that faculty participate in their institutional repositories (though a waiver can be requested). At others, participation is entirely optional. Some of the better known open-access archives in academia are subject-specific repositories with scholarship from many institutions. These include SSRN (Social Science Research Network), PubMed Central for biomedical and life sciences research, and arXiv.org for mathematics, physics, and related fields. (Boston’s Simmons College maintains a list of subject-specific repositories... Last November 2012, CUNY’s University Faculty Senate (UFS) approved a resolution that supported the creation of an institutional repository at City University of New York, with faculty “encourage[d] but not require[d]” to participate. To move toward the new goal, the UFS then formed an Open Access Advisory Group, led by Polly Thistlethwaite, chief librarian at the Graduate Center. Other members include Curtis Kendrick, University Dean for Libraries and Information Resources, other university librarians, and supporters of open-access policies from across the university..."