“Open Conversations about Open Access” Welcome

Contributed by Nicole Sump-Crethar

The “Open Conversations about Open Access” conference started some exciting conversations. Rick Luce, Dean of Libraries at OU introduced the speakers for the conference as his “Open Access Dream Team.” In his introduction he included a little about his vision of Open Access.
Open access (sometimes abbreviated as OA) is “the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. OA is also increasingly being provided to theses, scholarly monographs and book chapters,” according to Wikipedia. Luce went on to describe how OA should look to readers, authors and to the university.

• Readers should see OA as immediate, free, worldwide access.
• Authors should be able to protect their traditional rights.
• The university should see open access as an extension of their mission where works created at the university should be used for the greatest possible benefit and should stimulate innovation.

The first speaker on Thursday, Heather Joseph, the executive director for The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition or SPARC, kicked off the meeting with an overview of where open access started and how far it has come in terms of acceptance in the scholarly community and in national legislation and regulation. She described the situation we are already familiar with here at OSU. Budgets continue to shrink while costs continue to rise at a faster pace than inflation. Happily, recent legislation followed by some important regulations at the federal level are requiring researchers who receive funding from government agencies to make their research available to the public. In essence, if taxpayers fund the research, then taxpayers should have free and open access to that research.

Joseph also talked about the current state of OA publishing in terms of infrastructure and popularity. For example, the Directory of Open Access Journals offers 8,600 journals in nearly every discipline imaginable.

What are your perceptions of open access? What do you think the perception of open access is on our campus?