Open Access Craze Hits Universities
Competition is certainly good for us. One by one, the big league universities in the Boston neighborhood are going OPEN ACCESS.
Open access to publications. Image: sxc.hu
Open access publishing means that research works can be read (online) and used freely by the public without paying subscription fees to journals and publishers. I know personally how expensive it is to subscribe to just one journal, and the information from abstracts are really so limited that having more open access journals is just good for the science.
Last January, the University of California and publication giant Springer agreed to have articles written by UP-affiliated authors to be published immediately and in full, even if the rest of Springer’s articles remain subscription-only.
In early February, Harvard University’s Arts and Sciences agreed to support an open access system. Harvard faculty will also be required to only submit to journals that will publish their work online immediately after acceptance for publication. Following suit, Boston U and MIT independently announced that the work of faculties all across their universities will be accessible to the public for free.
Lest anyone get the wrong idea: Open access is not free. University libraries have to pay open-access journals to have their research published, and the cost for pre-pay memberships have gone up in the last few years. The public does not need to pay subscription fees, but the researchers do. So, MIT will now be storing their research materials at the MIT DSpace : http://dspace.mit.edu/. Boston and Harvard are also working on their own online repositories.
Hopefully, more universities will follow and set up their own websites, or partner with publishers to get the cost of publication lowered and open-access more available.
Image: sxc.hu