Access to the results of academic scholarship and research is in a crisis today due in part to the proliferation of expensive, for-profit, scholarly journals. Most library budgets can no longer maintain extensive collections of periodicals, let alone acquire new ones. Consequently, the realm of accessible knowledge has declined as the work of the academy succumbs to commercial interests.
The academic community has facilitated this decline by being ready and willing to assign to publishers copyright for works, in return for publication. Along the way publishers gained enormous control over how the results of academic work are disseminated, typically opting for a for-profit model of selling it back to those who would benefit from it.
We have also assisted private, for-profit journal publishers by providing them with a free and willing workforce to carry out the peer review of articles and other scholarly works, ensuring high standards and bolstering credibility for the journal.
CAUT’s position on this is well-articulated in its policy statement on scholarly communication first adopted in 2004. Scholarly communications are a public good that must not be limited by commercial or private interests or restrictive institutional policies. Any limitations to the dissemination or discussion of scholarly activity necessarily threaten academic freedom and undermine the public good.
CAUT has long urged academic staff to retain copyright and control of their work, and to carefully examine any publishing arrangement which might seek to transfer these to a publisher. This is critical to ensuring the widest possible dissemination of scholarly work in a manner that is freely accessible. Academic staff members are encouraged to be more proactive by establishing and supporting credible, non-commercial fora, such as open access journals or institutional repositories, for peer review and distribution of the results of scholarly work and research.
A major advancement in this direction — the Budapest Open Access Initiative — was launched more than a decade ago by the Open Society Foundations. The initiative articulated a statement of principles, strategy and commitment with a goal of making research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet.
The statement begins with the declaration: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good.” Its reference is to the long-standing willingness of academics to publish purely for the benefit of knowledge coupled with the seemingly unlimited potential of the internet to provide free and unrestricted access to the scholarly works of the academy.
Today, there are generally two accepted mechanisms by which open access can be realized. The “gold” standard envisions the emergence of new peer-reviewed, open access journals which do not charge readers for access. Complementing this, the “green” standard allows authors to continue publishing in journals of their choice but they must also deposit a copy of their work in some repository or database designed to provide ready and free access to scholarly work.
Since the inception of the Budapest Initiative there has been some international progress toward taking up its ideas. Government policy, infrastructure support and other programs have been created to support the initiative, primarily in Europe, Australia and the United States. Much of this support has promoted the “green” standard in the form of both national and institutional repositories.
In Canada, though, advancement has been much slower. A number of research agencies, primarily in the health sector, now have open access policies. Many of these reflect the policy direction of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research which requires grant recipients to “make every effort to ensure that their peer-reviewed publications are freely accessible.” But most major research universities in Canada have institutional repositories supported by policies that only encourage authors to contribute. Only one Canadian university, Concordia, requires its academic staff members do so. At this time, also, there is no funded national program promoting open access.
The broader movement toward open access is not without its opposition. As expected, larger corporate, for-profit publishers argue that it undermines their business models. Smaller discipline-specific societies, which offer access to their journal publications as a benefit of membership, worry about losing their membership without the exclusivity of such a benefit. Satisfying these concerns under an open access model would require new approaches to funding the publication enterprise.
As well, there are additional issues that would need to be resolved if the project is to succeed. For instance, should contribution of published work to institutional or national repositories by individual authors be a mandatory condition of funding? Currently, the onus is on the individual author to negotiate with the publisher the right to retain copyright, or at least the permission to contribute a copy of the work to a reposÂitory. As yet, experience in this regard has not been encouraging.
There does now seem to be some hope at the national level. The three federal granting agencies have announced their intention to bring forward a national policy by January 2014 for a unified open access model that will apply to all results generated by publically-funded scholarly work and research in Canada. The details of this initiative are still unknown, but it appears that the direction is toward a “green” standard.
CAUT is pleased that a national open access project is now moving forward in what appears to be a broadly progressive direction that reflects CAUT’s policy and the core values of open scholarly communication.