Oberlin Joins the Ranks of Faculty Endorsed Open Access

Oberlin College Faculty Unanimously Endorses Open Access - Press Release 11/20/2009

OBERLIN, OHIO -- The Oberlin College General Faculty unanimously endorsed on November 18 a resolution to make their scholarly articles openly accessible on the Internet. As a result of the measure, the rich scholarly output of the Oberlin faculty will become available to a much broader national and international audience. The Oberlin resolution is similar to policies passed at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Kansas, and Trinity University.

“Through this resolution the Oberlin College faculty has expressed a principled commitment to disseminating their scholarship as widely as possible,” said Sebastiaan Faber, Professor of Hispanic Studies and Chair of the General Faculty Library Committee. “The current system of journal publishing, which largely relies on subscriptions and licenses, limits access to research information in significant ways, particularly for students and faculty at smaller and less wealthy institutions, as well as for the general public. Access is also seriously limited around the world in countries with fewer resources.”

Under the new policy, Oberlin faculty and professional staff will make their peer-reviewed, scholarly articles openly accessible in a digital archive managed by the Oberlin College Library as part of the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons. Oberlin authors may opt out of the policy for a specific article if they are not in a position to sign journal publishing agreements that are compatible with the policy, or for other reasons. The resolution also creates an institutional license that gives Oberlin College the legal right to make the articles accessible on the Internet through the digital archive. The resolution further encourages, but does not require, authors to submit publications other than peer-reviewed articles in the same manner.

“Moving toward open access makes economic, philosophical, and ethical sense,” said Faber. “Open access democratizes knowledge and helps level the scholarly playing field.” Faber also notes that the policy will benefit Oberlin’s authors by increasing access to their work, making the high-quality scholarship of Oberlin faculty much more visible to external audiences. “We hope that other colleges and universities will follow suit by adopting similar policies,” he said.

“I’m delighted that Oberlin’s faculty and staff have made this important commitment to open access,” said Ray English, Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries. “The movement for open access to scholarly research information is international in scope and growing rapidly as academic institutions, research-funding agencies, and policy makers see the benefits of unfettered access to scholarly research. The library looks forward to putting in place the support structures that are needed to carry out this important initiative.”

Adopted at the recommendation of the General Faculty Library Committee, the policy calls for the committee, in consultation with a faculty council, to establish procedures for carrying out the policy and to monitor its implementation. Policy implementation will be coordinated by a scholarly communications officer, a member of the library staff designated by the director of libraries. The text of the faculty resolution is available online at: http://tinyurl.com/ykyfz2j

The Oberlin College Student Senate recently endorsed the national “Student Statement on the Right to Research,” which expresses a similar commitment to making scholarly research information openly accessible.

New Google Settlement

The revised Google Settlement document is now available for review. You can read responses in the following places:

• New York Times, Nov. 14, 2009

• Open Book Alliance response

• Library Journal, Nov. 14 article
  
  
• Wall Street Journal, Nov. 14 article

For an excellent summary of the changes in the revised document, see Kevin Smith's posting on the Duke Scholarly Communication blog.

If you have additional articles or comments you'd like to share, please post.

First Liberal Arts College to Adopt Open Access - Trinity University

I want to sincerely congratulate my colleague, Diane Graves, at Trinity University in San Antonio for her major accomplishment. Diane has been active in SPARC and a longtime advocate for Open Access and change in scholarly publishing. Diane has helped the rest of her colleagues in the Oberlin Group libraries by setting an example and leading the way for small, liberal arts colleges to adopt the open access standard. You can read the complete press release here. Kudos Diane!

Oberlin Letter to Scientific American

Scientific American was recently purchased by Nature publishing group. Our subscription was to increase from $24 per year to $300 per year. In addition to canceling our subscription, we joined with other library directors from 48 other Oberlin Group member libraries to send a letter protesting the price increase. Articles have appeared in a variety of places:

Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 13, "College Library Directors Protest Huge Jump in 'Scientific American' Price"

Inside Higher Ed, October 13, "Library Directors Protest 'Scientific American' Prices"

Library Journal, Oct. 13,"College Librarians Protest STM Pricing for Consumer Magazine Scientific American"


A copy of the Oberlin letter

And now we have the response from the publisher. If anyone believes we should resubscribe to this journal based on this letter, please do share your thoughts with me.

Letter of Support for Federal Research Access Act of 2009

President Brian Rosenberg is one of the 57 liberal arts college presidents who signed a letter of support for the new legislation to expand public access to federally funded research. An article in today's Inside Higher Education has the details and a link to the letter.

Compact for Open Access Publishing

Four universities have joined together to form a new iniative entitled Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) to support open access publishing. Information on the project which includes Cornell, Harvard, Dartmouth, MIT and my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, will be found at their website
http://www.oacompact.org/
The point of the project is to support "equity of the business models by committing each university to 'the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.'"

Universities and colleges are encouraged to join the initiative and sign on in a show of support.

More open access content in Google Books

The following article appeared in today's issue of Wired Campus. August 13, 2009

By Marc Beja with good news for open-access and Creative Commons advocates.

Original posting

"Authors who feared the expansion of Google Books' library, or who felt the company was hoarding books and filling its own coffers, now have a little less to worry about.

Google announced today that it will let authors use Google Books to distribute works that they have published under Creative Commons licenses. Readers will be able to download the copyrighted books and share them with other Google Books users as long as they comply with the authors' decisions on how the material can be used. (There are six different Creative Commons licenses, which let authors require, among other things, that their books can be repurposed only with attribution or only for non-commercial use.)

Nine books are already available to download, including Code: Version 2, by Lawrence Lessig, a director of Creative Commons, who is an advocate for open-access for books."