You’ve heard of climate change, but how familiar are you with the term climate justice? It’s the topic of the week since it’s the theme of International Open Access Week 2022, an occasion for challenging each other to raise awareness and take action on climate justice through the open and interdisciplinary sharing of data and resources.
With hurricanes, heat waves, and forest fires appearing more regularly in our news cycle, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that the discussion of our changing climate is becoming a bigger part of our lives. As we better understand the enormous threat that climate change poses to our planet, we more desperately than ever need to also have a grasp on climate justice–the aspiration to have all people, regardless of personal or community characteristics, treated fairly when it comes to protection, risks, policies, and decision-making around the impacts of climate change. In other words, when it comes to our environment and the changes happening globally, we must strive to consider everyone, understand how they’ll be impacted differently, and make decisions fairly.
While the term may be new to some, in reality calls for climate justice have been ongoing for decades. In fact, climate justice was born out of the environmental justice movement and is related to other calls to treat people more equitably such as movements for racial or social justice. Why is this so important? We know from past catastrophes that people’s level of vulnerability can vary widely based on their personal circumstances or their community’s demographics. This is one aspect of climate change where data and Open Access become very important; we need the open sharing of knowledge in order to address this important social and environmental issue and ensure justice for all. But, who has access?
Free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research on climate change and how various demographics and geographies are impacted would be a powerful tool to aid and equip the communities most at risk. Removing barriers to accessing climate research would also enable faster communication and better engagement of both the general public and policymakers on related societal issues. Instead of data being individually owned and only available to those who can afford to access it, the general public would have the right to use scientific research results as needed. The best examples of this have been projects attempting to map overburdened, at-risk communities by incorporating a wide range of data, going beyond looking at risk from a one dimensional geographical perspective.
For example, check out the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. Start by putting in the zip code of your hometown, and use it to have a look at the environmental and economic conditions of various communities. Then try exploring the area around FSU to familiarize yourself with the communities nearby and see how their issues compare to those in your hometown.
Such tools are a great visual way to represent the combination of so much data. Use them as inspiration for starting conversations about climate change and/or justice. Climate Justice demands cross disciplinary collaboration, so campus forums like the Open Scholars Project could also serve as incubators for the climate action needed in our region and beyond. Through open information exchange and collaboration, we can create resources for understanding the needs of communities as well as non-human environments by evaluating their vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. Join together with your neighbors, campus groups, or local organizations to consider how best to take action to improve the resilience of communities where you live, study, work, or play. Whether that means volunteering, marching, donating, or joining, we need everyone’s contribution to make our communities more just and resilient in the face of climate change.
For more information about how the FSU Libraries supports open access, please visit our Research and Publishing web page here.
Author Bio: Mila S. Turner is the Social Science Data & Research Librarian at FSU Libraries and a broadly trained environmental sociologist. Her research spans diverse areas including how social inequalities intersect with environmental justice, racial equity, and natural disasters. Her thought leadership has been featured in The Hill, World War Zero, Quad Magazine, and more.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) made groundbreaking progress at the end of August when they released a memorandum that updated their policy guidance to specify that data and results coming from taxpayer-supported research must be made immediately available and accessible to the public at no cost. OSTP also issued directions for agencies to update their public access policies and data sharing plans as soon as possible to make publications and the research they host publicly accessible, without an embargo or cost and in machine-readable formats to enable their full use and reuse.
So what does this truly mean for students and researchers?
For many students, OSTP and any of the memorandums that have been released prior to the latest one (which many are calling the Nelson Memo as it was issued by Dr. Alondra Nelson, currently the acting director of the OSTP,) is mostly a foreign subject. What is OSTP and why does it matter? As a Graduate Student myself, I was surprised to learn about the strides taken by the government agency leading up to the release of this memorandum, and the historical struggle to achieve an open science framework that works for the masses and which aims to combat discrimination and structural inequalities inherent in the funding and publishing disadvantages experienced by underserved backgrounds and minorities, as well as early-career researchers.
Like many students at universities, it is easy to take the access we have to library resources, journals, and repositories for granted, especially when they meet our immediate needs. But looking at the world around us and the integration of advancing technology into everyday life and society, it is clear we live in a data driven world, making the availability and access of information a premium. Metadata, or data that describes other data, has become one of the most important concepts in the field of information, as it allows researchers to organize the data from their research or from other projects in a way that is meaningful and often cross-disciplinary in its application. This means that data can have unintended benefits and relevance to other researchers to inform their own work, assuming that they are able to access that data. With the Nelson Memo, access to publicly funded research has been defined and recognized as a right to the public.
Until now there have been clear barriers set in place to promote the interests of academic journals and publishing, and while some of these will still exist even after all of the federal grant-making agencies release their plans for new policy implementation, this advancement toward open access establishes a clear standard moving forward. It sets the United States apart in this respect as global leaders of change in the field of open science. Prior to the Nelson memorandum’s release, Plan S, served as the global standard for open access policy guidance. It mandated that access to publications that have been produced through research grants must be immediately open and fully accessible without being monetized in any form, setting the stage for the standard that OSTP wanted to mirror and build upon.
“cOAlition S”, a consortium of national research agencies and funders from twelve European countries developed around the implementation of Plan S, has come out in support of the newest memorandum and OSTP. More broadly calling the guidance “fully aligned with the open access policies of many forward looking universities and research agencies who have implemented Plan S”, also acknowledging its correlation with the recent UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO at its 41st session last November. Plan S realizes that we have the necessary elements and collective ability to produce digital content as well as public goods that can be shared to help shape the vision of a large connected community that makes up one body, rather than smaller disjointed organs that mirror each other because they cannot see what the other does. All of that is to say, essentially these paywalls of entry to access research act as hurdles that deny the very nature of science as a tool to better understand and help humanity as a whole.
Globally, we saw the power of open science at work in combating the COVID-19 pandemic and bringing the scientific community together, as commercial journals and governments were forced to alter their typical subscription based structure in favor of providing temporary open access to COVID-19 and monkeypox related research data. This allowed for the development of a vaccine and ensured that the common masses had the most credible data driven information to inform their health-based choices and medical practice. Countries across the globe spend billions of dollars on research and experimental development. The United States is no different, with estimates conducted by National Science Foundation (NSF) totalling nearly $667 Billion dollars for the year 2019 alone, continuing to grow in size each of the following years. The expectation would be that the government funding the research would have ownership of the data collected and analyzed, however in the current copyright structure agreement, publicly funded research is often turned over to commercial journals.
One of the largest concerns catalyzed by the newest memo is understanding how the policy changes will affect the viability of the current subscription model when considering the important role journals play in supporting research, such as peer reviews. Publishers were more circumspect about the changes, designating some amount of skepticism towards the question of how the shift to full open access would be funded. To alleviate this issue researchers can now use research grants and funds to support the publication components of the new policies put forth by OSTP. On the other side of the argument, students stand to benefit from open access journals in terms of the widened levels of exposure that their research will receive with entry points to view such articles increasing exponentially. In addition, libraries across the country suffer from the subscription based model with journals and are not in a position to subscribe to every single research journal that exists. FSU Libraries subscribes to several journals and databases to provide access for its students, but an increase in publicly funded and published research can only append the framework of available research, data, and information that student communities here and at other universities will have access to. Looking forward towards the future, this relationship with academic journals and publishing must continue to evolve and change.
Ideally, community owned and managed public knowledge infrastructure seems to be the long term solution, but how do we get there? Creative Commons, a non-profit organization and international network devoted to open access and broadening the scope of educational as well as creative works to be made available for others to build upon and share with legal protections, believes we must work on the progression of “open licensing to ensure open re-use rights”. I believe that if we want to move beyond access and towards improved sharing of the information and data we collect, produce, and use, we must begin following these steps and supporting organizations, like Creative Commons or the Subcommittee on Open Science, as well as continue to expand who contributes to new knowledge. Most importantly we must stay informed with the latest policy updates and changes, guiding researchers to success from different backgrounds and at all levels of experience.
Committed to the development of open science, Florida State University Libraries is devoted to the free exchange and access of information on a global scale for the good of people everywhere. This change in policy not only reinforces our mission, but also prioritizes the need for comprehensive support and resources to support the students and research that our institution hosts. We are thrilled to continue to work alongside our researchers, offering a wide array of different services and workshops to navigate through these policy changes, as they openly share and provide increased access to their work. We will continue to develop upon this foundation and explore more ways we can champion open science at Florida State University and beyond.
For more information about how the FSU Libraries supports open access, please visit our Research and Publishing web page here.
For more specific details or information on the Nelson Memo, please see the White House OSTP announcement, here.
Author Bio: Liam Wirsansky is a second-year MSI student at Florida State University and the STEM Libraries Graduate Assistant at FSU’s Dirac Library. He currently serves as the President and Artistic Director of White Mouse Theatre Productions at FSU and acts as the Director of Research and Development for the Rosenstrasse Foundation. Liam loves the academic outlet that research has provided him as well as the opportunity to educate and assist students in the development of their information literacy skills.
FSU Libraries participated in the recently published Ithaka S+R report, “What’s the Big Deal? How Researchers Are Navigating Changes to Journal Access.” The article focuses on institutions who have cancelled big deal subscription packages and those who were ready to cancel. For this project, 11 academic libraries were selected to explore faculty research habits, how they obtain research materials, how they view academic publishing models, and how this informs the libraries’ ongoing strategic decision making about Big Deal journal subscriptions.
Valerie Boulos, Associate Dean for Resource Management & Discovery Services, Renaine Julian, director of STEM Libraries, and Scott Schmucker, Electronic Resources Librarian, participated in the project. Julian and Schmucker acted as research partners by interviewing FSU faculty, gathering data, and submitting their findings. Interview questions focused on measuring the impact of these decisions, the exploration of open access models, and how research occurs after cancellation.
The team was pleased to see that the experiences of FSU faculty were well represented in the overall results of the study, which gave insight into the discovery habits, publishing preferences, and appreciation of the library as aspects of faculty research.
To learn more about FSU’s Big Deal cancellation, click here.
Open access is a global movement to freely publish research in online repositories and open publications instead of the costly subscription-based publishing models that have dominated the scholarly publishing industry for decades. Paywalled research is only available to those who can afford to pay subscription costs, leaving many researchers and institutions around the world unable to access critical findings in their fields. Open access allows research to reach a wider, global audience and leads to greater readership, citation, and innovation. Authors can publish their work openly by archiving accepted manuscripts in institutional repositories like DigiNole, publishing completed drafts on preprint servers, or submitting to open access journals.
Open Initiatives at FSU
In 2016, the FSU Faculty Senate adopted an Open Access Policy that grants the Libraries permission to archive scholarly works created by FSU faculty. The policy is intended to increase the availability of research developed at FSU to readers and scholars around the world. The Libraries use mediated deposits and automated harvesting workflows to populate DigiNole, our institutional repository. A three-year review found steady growth in repository deposits since the Open Access Policy was implemented. This trend continued in 2019 which saw over 2,000 objects added to DigiNole. Departments with 100 or more DigiNole uploads this year include the Department of Psychology, the Department of Biological Sciences, and the National High Magnetic Field Lab.
Scholarly Articles in DigiNole by Year
Another way the Libraries support open access includes the Open Access Fund which helps authors publish in open journals. Some open access journals require authors to pay article processing charges (APCs) to finance the technical work that goes into preparing, publishing, and preserving web publications. APCs can cost upwards of $2,000 for some publishers. To help authors mitigate this expense, the Open Access Fund provides awards of up to $1,500 for qualified proposals. In 2019, the Libraries funded 38 open access articles with funding support support from the College of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School, and the Office of the Provost.
Open access is not limited to research articles. Textbook costs have increased 82% since 2002 (nearly three times the rate of inflation), and textbook affordability for students is a growing concern nationwide.¹ Instructors are turning to open educational resources to reduce textbook costs. In the 2017-2018 academic year, 43% of students in Florida reported spending over $300 per semester on textbooks, and 64.2% of students were unable to purchase a textbook due to high costs.² Florida Virtual Campus hosted an Open Educational Resources Summit in the spring of 2018 where librarians and educators from across the state came together to discuss challenges and opportunities for implementing OER on their campuses. Mallary Rawls represented FSU Libraries at the Summit and reported on the event in a March blog post.
Instructors at FSU have been adopting open course materials and using resources from the Libraries to decrease textbook expenses for students. Dr. Vanessa Dennen in the Department of Education created an open textbook in 2018 and reported on student’s perceptions of the open materials in a recent issue of Online Learning. The Libraries published two open access textbooks this year in DigiNole to fill subject gaps in existing open materials.
Dr. Giray Ökten and Dr. Arash Fahim received Alternative Textbook Grant awards that helped transform their lecture notes into open mathematics textbooks. First Semester in Numerical Analysis with Julia and Financial Mathematics: Concepts and Computational Methods support subjects that are not well-covered by traditional textbooks in the field. The Alternative Textbook Grants have saved students $333,356 since 2016. Instructors can visit the Alternative Textbook Grants webpage for more information.
In addition to cost savings, open course materials have the added benefit of perpetual access. Unlike access codes and textbook rentals that are only available for a limited time, open materials are freely available online or through the library without access restrictions. With open online course materials, instructors can easily update textbooks with new material, and students can be assured they are accessing the most current version of the information. Open educational resources offer greater flexibility for instructors to customize their course content and increase textbook affordability for students.
Open access is critical for advancing the global knowledge commons and scientific innovation, and open educational resources promote student success by increasing the accessibility of course materials. The Libraries are proud of the progress we have made this year in furthering open access, and we look forward to continuing this important work in the future.
FSU Libraries is proud to announce the winners of our 2018-2019 round of Alternative Textbook Grants. The grant program, launched by the Libraries in November 2016, awards successful applicants with $1,000 to support the adoption or creation of open or library-licensed course materials that are available at no cost to students. These high-quality materials are written by experts and peer-reviewed, ensuring a level of intellectual and instructional rigor on par with expensive commercial equivalents.
Applications were evaluated based on criteria balancing the estimated savings to students, the openness of the proposed materials, and the likelihood of the materials being adopted by other courses at FSU.
Based on projected enrollment figures for the courses in question, the instructors participating in this round of the program are expected to save FSU students up to $167,800 by Fall 2019, and the total projected savings across all grant recipients since the program’s inception are expected to exceed $437,000.
Congratulations to this year’s winners! For more information about the open education movement and related initiatives at FSU, see our research guide on OER, or contact Devin Soper, Director of FSU Libraries’ Office of Digital Research & Scholarship.
2018-2019 Grant Recipients
John Bandzuh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography. His research interests include health geography, political ecology, and vector-borne diseases. This is Bandzuh’s second alternative textbook grant. With his first grant, he used library-licensed journal articles in GEO4930 “Geography of Wine”. This year he plans to adopt an open textbook in his Summer 2019 World Geography course.
Kathleen Burnett is the F. William Summers Professor in the School of Information. Her research interests include Social Informatics, Gender, Race, and Ethnicity and IT, and Information Ethics. Dr. Burnett plans to author chapters for her own open textbook and incorporate online resources and videos in her Fall and Spring offerings of IDS2144 “Information Ethics in the 21st Century”.
Austin Bush is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography. His research interests include GIS, remote sensing, and spatial analysis. In lieu of a traditional textbook, he plans to use online mapping applications, scholarly articles, and videos in the Summer 2019 offering of GIS3015 “Map Analysis”.
Rob Duarte is a Professor in the Department of Art, co-director of the Facility for Arts Research, and Director of REBOOT Laboratory. Professor Duarte will adopt an open textbook for the new course “Interactive Art II: Electronic Objects” in Fall 2019. In the future, he plans to write his own companion to the text focusing on physical computing and electronic art.
Raphael Kampmann is an Assistant Professor in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the FSU-FAMU College of Engineering. His research interests include multi-axial failure behavior of concrete, construction materials, and destructive test methods. In place of a textbook, Dr. Kampmann will create his own course materials in the 2019-2020 offerings of EGM3512 “Engineering Mechanics”.
Jessica Malo is an adjunct professor of Arabic and Film Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. Malo recently returned from a year of teaching English as a second language in Lebanon and published her first work of Arabic poetry “لو مشى معي قرص الشمس” (If the Disk of Sun Would Walk With Me). She will adopt an open textbook on Middle Eastern history and Culture in upcoming offerings of IDS3450 “Through an Arabic Lens: The Intersection of Film and Culture”.
Lisa Munson is Teaching Faculty in the Department of Sociology. She studies social inequality and social justice, particularly public sociology – applying sociological knowledge to promote social justice in the community. Dr. Munson was also one of the 2018 Alternative Textbook Grant recipients for a Sociology course taught in Florence in which she used an open textbook. With this grant, she will use an open textbook and journal articles in the Summer 2019 offering of SYP4570 “Deviance and Social Control”.
Alysia Roehrig is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology & Learning Systems. Dr. Roehrig’s research interests focus on issues related to effective teaching, particularly exploring the successes of students labeled at risk for school failure. She will use chapters from two open textbooks on research methods in the Summer 2019 online offering of EDF5481 “Methods of Educational Research”.
Zoe Schroder is Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography. Some of her research interests include meteorology, climatology, and severe weather patterns. In place of a textbook, Schroder will incorporate government climate reports and journal articles in the Summer 2019 offering of GEO4251 “Geography of Climate Change and Storms”.
Michael Shatruk is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. His lab researches photo-switchable molecular materials, intermetallic magnets for magnetic refrigeration and electric vehicles, and low-dimensional magnetic materials such as spin-frustrated 2D magnets and nanomagnets. Dr. Shatruk received two grants this academic year to support the adoption and creation of open course materials. With a grant from International Programs, he will adopt an open textbook for CHM1020 at the Valencia study center this summer. With funding from the Libraries, he and his colleagues will develop an open-access online laboratory manual for a new undergraduate Materials Chemistry laboratory course offered in Spring 2020.
International Programs Grant Recipients
Lydia Hanks is an Associate Professor in the Dedman School of Hospitality. Dr. Hanks’ teaching areas include hospitality accounting, lodging operations, and service management. She will use an open textbook in the Summer 2019 offering of HFT2716 “International Travel and Culture” in Florence, Italy.
Cynthia Johnson is Specialized Teaching Faculty in the Dedman School of Hospitality. Her teaching areas include introductory hospitality, internationals tourism, and club and golf course management. She will adopt an open access textbook and other alternative resources in the Summer 2019 offerings of HFT3240 “Managing Service Organizations” and HFT 2716 “International Travel and Culture” in Nice, France.
Patrick Merle is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Director of the Integrated Marketing Program. His teaching interests include International Public Relations, Political Communication, and Public Relations Techniques. Dr. Merle will adopt open textbooks in PUR4400 “Crisis Communication” offered in Summer 2019 in Florence, Italy.
Anthony Rhine is a Professor in the School of Theatre and Director of the Theatre Management program. Dr. Rhine teaches courses on Audience Development and Arts Marketing, Project Management, and Resource Management. He will use an open textbook and a library licensed e-book in the Summer 2019 offering of MAN3240 “Organizational Behavior” at the Valencia study center.
Jimmy Yu is an Associate Professor of Chinese Buddhism in the Department of Religion. He teaches courses in Chinese religious traditions, with an emphasis in Buddhism and Daoism. Dr. Yu will use library-licensed e-books and articles in the Summer 2019 offering of REL3340 “Buddhist Tradition” at the London study center.
Perhaps you are a new professor at Florida State University. And perhaps you have some articles you would like to publish. However, there are a few things getting in your way:
Publishing contracts often confusing and restrictive, leaving faculty with little control over their work once it has been published
The journals you would like to publish in often keep your work behind a paywall so that only a fraction of the world’s population can access it (which decreases your the impact of your research)
Journals that do allow you to make your work openly available often have high article processing charges (APCs) which you can’t necessarily afford
Two recent developments may help you with these conundrums. The first is the Faculty Senate Open Access Policy. This policy was passed by unanimous vote on February 17th of this year. It creates a safe harbor for faculty intellectual property rights by granting FSU permission to share scholarly journal articles for non-commercial purposes. Basically, this gives faculty the language to avoid overly-restrictive publication contracts, and allows them to more easily share their work, despite publishers’ efforts to put scholarship behind a paywall.
The launch of DigiNole: FSU’s Research Repository comes on the heels of the OA Policy, and provides faculty with a platform for making their research publicly available online. DigiNole is an open access repository, which allows anyone to view the scholarship contained within it. By making all of FSU’s articles available in repositories like DigiNole, scholars and researchers can increase the visibility and impact of their research by 50-500%, according to several studies. You can even track your impact more easily with DigiNole, since faculty who deposit their scholarship get monthly readership reports with analytics on the use of their scholarship. Having easy access to these numbers can help with hiring and promotion, as it gives you concrete and tangible evidence of your impact.
The Office of Digital Research and Scholarship at the University Libraries specializes in academic publishing and open access. If you have any questions about DigiNole or the OA policy, contact Devin Soper (850.645.2600), Scholarly Communications Librarian at Strozier Library.
FSU Libraries have been forced to cancel a ‘big deal’ journal package with Springer. The available budget for library collections at FSU has remained flat for the past five years, while the cost of library resources has risen by 4-6% annually, and by as much as 9% for journal subscriptions in STEM-related fields. This situation is inherently unsustainable, and it is the product of the subscription-based model of scholarly publishing. Under this model, the cost of journal subscriptions has increased at 300% the rate of inflation since 1986, resulting in tremendous financial burden on academic libraries and their parent universities. The subscription model also restricts the dissemination of faculty research, placing it behind paywalls so that anyone who can’t pay can’t read it, and thereby limiting its impact on other researchers and the general public.
Open Access(OA) is a movement based on the principle that this situation is fundamentally unjust, and that the fruits of academic endeavor should be freely available to everyone. OA archiving and publishing are the two main strategies for accomplishing this goal, and they promise to benefit both the global research community and individual authors, moving published research into the open and thereby broadening its readership and generating more citations. OA is also fast becoming a requirement for recipients of research funding, as many public and private funding agencies are enacting public access policies to make the results of funded research accessible to all.
But how is OA relevant to FSU Libraries’ current budget crisis? Does OA provide viable alternatives to the subscription-based model of scholarly publishing? How does OA propose to counteract the predatory pricing practices of commercial academic publishers, and how successful has it been in that effort thus far? Do current developments suggest that OA will provide a long-term solution in future? To explore these questions, let’s take a closer look at the main forms of OA and how they compare to the traditional model.
Did you know that the e-journals you access through FSU Libraries are unavailable to most students and researchers in the developing world? What about people here in the US? Did you know that most members of the general public also don’t have access? The internet has revolutionized the way that we share and access information, yet most scholarly e-books and journal articles remain locked behind paywalls for the average reader.
Open Accessis a movement based on the principle that this situation is fundamentally unjust, and that the fruits of academic endeavor should be freely available to the public. Open Access is also increasingly becoming a requirement for recipients of research funding, with governments and funding agencies increasingly adopting public-access policies to make the results of funded research accessible to all.
Making your work publicly available can also benefit you as an author, increasing the reach and impact of your work by making it more discoverable and potentially generating more downloads and citations than you would if your work remained locked behind paywalls.
So, what can you do to start taking advantage of these benefits? And how can you get involved in the OA movement, more generally?Continue reading Open Access Week 2015
Open access is the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research. It has direct and widespread implications for academia and society as a whole.
Open Access Week, October 20-26, is a global event now entering its eighth year, an opportunity for the academic and research community to learn about the benefits of open access and to inspire wider participation in helping to make open access the new norm in scholarship and research. This year’s theme for Open Access Week is Generation Open, a recognition of the changing and evolving nature of the academy as new researchers enter its ranks.
There are lots of ways to be involved:
STUDENTS
Part of a registered student organization? Invite representatives of the Libraries to come talk about open access with your group, and consider signing the Student Statement on the Right to Research. The Student Government Association, Congress of Graduate Students, and the American Library Association FSU Student Chapter led the way by endorsing the Statement last year. The Statement can be signed by individuals as well as organizations. Continue reading Open Access Week 2014
The Department of Energy has become the first federal funding agency to release a public access policy under last year’s Office of Science and Technology Policy Directive. Broadly speaking, the newly announced policy will make published research resulting from DOE funds available to the public on the Web. This policy follows a similar, and long-standing policy by the National Institutes of Health. The DOE Public Access Plan is being received with mixed criticism by stakeholders on both sides of the open access debate, evidenced by commentary from Michael Eisen, an OA advocate, and The Scholarly Kitchen, the generally OA-skeptical blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing. Andrea Peterson, for the Washington Post, offers an overview and balanced perspective also.
One source of contention is the mechanism by which access is provided. Rather than directly hosting full text documents, the DOE portal, PAGES (Public Access Gateway for Energy & Science) will contain basic metadata with links to the full text on the publisher’s website when the Version of Record can be made available, or in a repository when the final Version of Record can’t be made available due to the terms of the publication agreement. Much of this is accomplished via the publisher-administered CHORUS (Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States). Critics have argued that CHORUS, itself a controversial topic, tips the scale of control too far towards the publishers, whose profit motive doesn’t always cohere with free and unfettered public access. Yet another point of difference centers on publisher-mandated embargoes, which delay release of the full text for a period of 12 months.
Of course, much remains to be seen as to how the public access policy will actually play out, which makes sense given that this is just the initial announcement. PAGES exists in beta right now and the DOE is inviting user feedback on the system. We should be seeing many more policies similar to this one in the near future as other agencies role out their own public access policies.
Florida State University Libraries offers support and resources for compliance with public access policies through our Office of Scholarly Communication.
