Copyright Guide: Open Access

Open access is a publishing model which is intended to make scholarly output widely available on the open web.

The open access model operates on several assumptions:

That the free, timely, and open exchange of information benefits scholarly progress and society at large.

That copyright law is intended to benefit society by providing some rights to creators but also, and equally importantly, allowing other creators to use those copyrighted materials to advance the arts and sciences.

The open access model addresses several problems within scholarly publishing:

• The cost of journal subscriptions has increased at exponential rates over the last three decades. According to the Association of Research Libraries’ ARL Statistics 2008–2009, the cost of journal subscriptions increased 381% between 1986 and 2009, compared to a 97% increase in inflation (consumer price index).  (cited in OA by the Numbers)
• At the same time, libraries have been forced to decrease their expenditures for books (by 9% between 1986 and 2001) to keep up with the increasing costs of journal subscriptions.
• Also concurrently, electronic access has moved from an ownership model, where the library can provide a physical or electronic copy to its patrons for as long as the medium persists, to a licensing of access model, where the ability to retrieve the material can be be removed at any time.
• Mergers and consolidation in the publishing industry has limited choice and ability to negotiate. Libraries must work with only a few publishers to access most of the journals they need. This reduces their leverage for negotiating on prices. The journals they need are bundled with less needed journals, and librarians must purchase the bundle to get access to the necessary journal. Increased prices and bundling have forced libraries to abandon smaller publishers, limiting the field of scholarly inquiry.

These problems have been covered widely in the press (New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education) and are exemplified by a memo released by Harvard University’s Faculty Advisory Council.

You can contribute to the solutions to these problems.  McKillop Library’s institutional repository, eScholar, has been developed to collect the intellectual capital of the university. Faculty members, Ph.D. candidates, and students can deposit major works such as theses and dissertations, articles and manuscripts. eScholar content shows up in Google searches and makes your work more likely to be cited and read by diverse audiences across the planet. Published articles and other material may also be included in the institutional repository; librarians will work with publishers to secure permission to deposit published content in the repository. Consider depositing your work.

Other major institutional depositories include Harvard’s DASH, and University of California’s eScholarship

Another option for supporting open access is submitting your work to an open access journal in your field. Open access journals can be peer reviewed and each field offers examples of respectable open access journals.

Find open access journals in your field in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Below is  a video of a talk about the principles of open access by Peter Suber at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society

How do I get my publisher to agree to allow me to share my work via open access?

"SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system."

This is their author resources page: https://www.arl.org/sparc/author/

The Association of College and Research Libraries webcast on author rights

"Authors and Authority: Perspectives on negotiating licenses and copyright" Slides and Podcasts from John Ober Director, Education and Strategy, California Digital Library and David Hoole Head of Brand Marketing and Content Licensing, Nature Publishing Group

Adapted from Black’s Law Dictionary 9^th ed.

Practice of making work (usually scholarly) openly available on the Internet.  Work in such cases is meant to be left intact.

An institutional repository is an online storage location for the collected work of an institution.

Salve Regina University's institutional repository is https://escholar.salve.edu/. Escholar is searchable by Google and other search engines.

Depositing scholarly works to an institutional repository can increase citation rates, improve reach of scholarly writing, and facilitate the spread of ideas among disciplines.