NPG Library Advisory MeetingApril 2010

Open Access & 

            Academic Research LibrariesIn North America

The Premise of Open Access

Information wants to be free or does it? Phrase coined by Stewart Brand in 1984 at the first Hacker's Conference  The actual quote: "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

 

Association Support for Open Access

Three academic  research initiatives supporting open access in North America: Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

Association of Research Libraries Association of College & Research Libraries 

 

The ARL Leaders for Open Access

California Digital Library: http://www.cdlib.org/services/collections/openaccess.html Cornell University:http://www.library.cornell.edu/scholarlycomm/openaccess/

University of Michigan: https://open.umich.edu/

 

Barriers in North America

NIH-only major mandate

Impact factors still not high enough (caveat--they are climbing)

Few university mandates (again growing demand by higher education institutions)

No concerted national effort

 

Forces Encouraging Change

Financial crisis More mandates at both private & public UniversitiesMore faculty /researcher awareness of the costs of publishing

Impact factors growing for select OA publishers (PLoS, BMC)

 

Future of OA in the ARL Libraries

Libraries will partner with hybrid options

Any OA Publisher who can publish fast and deliver impact factor will continue to grow

Fees will need to be reasonable and within market scale

 

Thank You

Jill Emery, The University of Texas Libraries

j.emery@austin.utexas.edu