Hey, I'm Stanley Wilder, University Librarian at UNC Charlotte's Atkins Library.
And I'm Dr. Susan Arthur, Assistant Professor of Kinesiology at UNC Charlotte, and Chair of
the Faculty Advisory Library Committee.
and I are here to talk to you about open access and how it affects the research you publish.
The term "open access" has come to have all sorts of meanings.
We like the definition by the philosopher Peter Suber who says that open access publishing
is "digital, online, free of charge free of most copyright and licensing restrictions."
Board revealing quote:
Open Access �
digital, online, mostly free of charge
Lemme start with a story.
Let's say we've got a faculty member who conducts years of research, discovers something new,
and then works hard writing it all up into a manuscript.
Off it goes to a journal, where the article is reviewed and then yes!
They love it, they want to publish it, here's the contract.
Publisher says "Um, can we get this back by the end of the week?"
The faculty member takes a quick glance at the long, dense contract, she counts the months
till her tenure review, and then returns the signed contract by mail.
Fast forward a year later, and our faculty member decides to take her article to Kinkos
to make copies for her class, where she learns that she can't.
Sure - she's the author, but in that contract she gave her article to her publisher, and
now she has to pay to use it in her own class.
That scenario sounds like a bad joke, like it can't possibly happen.
But it does happen, and giving away your rights doesn't just affect photocopying.
You also give up the freedom to quote yourself at length in a later work, the right to distribute
your work as you see fit, reformatting, public performance, and public display. Oh, you can
do those things, but you've got to pay.
Faculty signing away their rights is just one piece of a much bigger problem.
A problem that Open Access can help start to fix.
No surprise, at the core of the problem is money.
Animated Graph: Monograph and Serial Expenditures in ARL Libraries, 1986-2005
Between 1986 and 2005, research journal prices rose 167%.
That's more than double the consumer price index.
At UNC Charlotte, our journals inflate at about 6% per year, which means that our 3.25
million dollar journal list doubles every 12 years.
There's no way... we can't afford this.
Nobody can afford this.
So, how do we fix a system where faculty give away their own work, but then pay big money
for the research they use?
And then the flipside: what about the researchers around the world who can't cite your work
because they can't afford the journals you're publishing in?
We're here to help raise faculty awareness of this problem at UNC Charlotte, and then
to encourage the University to support open access publication of research by signing
the Berlin Declaration on Open Access.
You're saying, "Wait a minute now, I don't want to sign anything!"
Well, let us tell you a little about the Berlin Declaration.
Back in 2003, the Max Planck Society hosted an international conference on open access.
That conference resulted in a simple one-page document written in 2003� we invite you
to read it yourself, it's easy to link to through the library's homepage.
Hundreds of research universities have signed on, and we'd like Charlotte to be the first
UNC system university on the list.
Here's what the document does:
It encourages faculty to publish in open access journals or repositories
It encourages them to participate in efforts to maintain quality controls like rigorous
peer review. High quality standards are a non-negotiable part of the kind of open access
we intend to support.
It asks faculty to support the technological infrastructure of open access�software tools,
and the descriptive data that makes articles findable.
It asks institutions to search for ways of making open access sustainable in financial
terms.
It is just as important to say what the Berlin Declaration doesn't do.
It doesn't require any faculty member to do anything they don't want to do. If you want
to publish in an expensive commercial journal, go right ahead. Everybody must have the freedom
to choose where they publish their work.
It doesn't commit institutions to making any changes to their promotion and tenure processes.
It doesn't even say that open access is good for all disciplines. High energy physics recently
decided that the entire discipline would move to open access. But other disciplines could
conceivably take an equally strong stand against it.
In short, the Berlin Declaration doesn't require UNC Charlotte to do anything at all.
It's just an expression of institutional support for the idea of open access.
It is, in fact, so much about "encouraging" and so little about "prescribing," you could
ask why we bother.
Well, we're serious when we say that our current path is just not sustainable.
Open access is literally the only viable alternative we know of.
We're here because we hope to raise awareness to these issues, we want to go on the record,
support the Berlin Declaration, and encourage faculty to publish in open access journals
and repositories whenever that is a good option. All of this moves us forward.
Atkins Library can help.
We can provide technologies and tech support staff. We've got a lawyer with an expertise
in authors' rights. We can serve as a resource for open access issues, we'll create web pages
with open access readings and news relevant to our campus. Right now we're working now
on establishing a library fund that would pay authors charges to reputable open access
publications.
So we hope you give these issues some thought, and we invite you to talk about them with
your colleagues. We especially want to hear about any thoughts or concerns you may have.
Thank you for your time.