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Open Access and Research Publishing

By Ann Wolpert, from BiblioTech, v.16:no.2, Fall 2004

It will kill scholarship! It will free research from a stranglehold!
Yes, it will! No, it won’t!

Thus goes the debate over open access, and its potential impact on the future of scholarly communication and research publishing. As important as research publishing is to university education, and as critical as it is to the ability of faculty and students to conduct non-profit research and scholarship, one can hardly blame a newcomer to the debate for wondering what the fuss is all about. And what is open access, anyway?

Open access encompasses a number of strategies for making digitally-formatted research and scholarship available to readers on the Internet without charge. Open access is the emerging counterpoint to the current digital publishing system, in which increasingly consolidated journal publishers retain long-term control (90 years) over both price and access conditions for the research and scholarship they publish.

The stakes are high and the stakeholders are formidable. Commercial and societal publishers fear the loss of control over lucrative, long-standing, international publishing programs. Universities and their libraries fear that without a better digital publishing and archiving system, uncontrolled costs and unacceptable licensing conditions will seriously undermine university teaching and research and the value those activities provide to society.

There are various proposals for how open access would work. Some disciplines (high-energy physics and economics, for example) already share much of their work openly at the preprint stage. And, bowing to author pressure, many (but certainly not all) publishers now permit authors to post their own articles on the Web.

Still other publishers make their articles available on the web free of charge after six months. And, as this newsletter goes to press, the National Institutes of Health has proposed a policy change that would require all scientists who receive funding from that agency to make the peer-reviewed results of their research available to the public on the free NIH web-based database 6 months after publication.

Why is open access so important to an institution like MIT? For the simple reason that published research and scholarship are (1) a critically important outcome of the work of the Institution and (2) a critically important form of “raw material” that supports teaching and research in higher education.

Institutions like MIT provide a physical and intellectual environment in which research and scholarship can advance. Universities insure the sustainability of intellectual disciplines by providing a stable base for faculty to work, an environment for students to learn and explore, and the laboratories, libraries, and networks necessary for the creation of new knowledge. Through the papers and presentations of faculty, universities readily and freely share with the world the new knowledge that is created by this value chain.

The tragedy of the current digital publishing system is that the traditional balance between the interests of publishers and the interests of universities has been shattered. In the digital publishing age, publishers (both commercial and societal) now have the ability to control the cost and the conditions under which published faculty research can be brought back into the university. Information still streams freely from academic institutions to publishers. But the flow of information back into the institution is, in many cases, both closely controlled and astonishingly expensive.

And so we come to open access, and to the deeply necessary conversation that must begin about the future of scholarly communication and research publishing. If progress is to continue, faculty, students, and the institutions that support their work must be able to access and use their research results and the results of their colleagues. This use must be fair, without unreasonable constraint, and at a rational cost.

The MIT Libraries are working closely with the Provost and the Faculty Committee on the Library System to increase awareness of this issue and encourage an ongoing dialogue about possible solutions. We are also collaborating with colleagues in academic libraries worldwide to promote open access initiatives such as DSpace. The work being done by institutions adopting DSpace, offers opportunities to gather data, analyze options, and inform the debate about new and better models of research publication.