For those that still aren't convinced of the importance of the Open Access movement, read Simon Caulkin's article in today's Guardian Observer (link courtesy of Open Access News). Caulkin's article succinctly pulls the major points of the open access debate together. For example, as he points out quite clearly,

How's this for a winning publishing formula? A university funds scientific research; the research is turned into a paper by an author, who pays a colour illustration and reprint charge - say, £1,000 - and surrenders the copyright for the privilege of publishing his findings in a specialised journal. Peers review the work for free, then the publisher prints the article - and sells it back for a hefty fee to the institution where the work was carried out in the first place.

. . . .

Over the past two years, protests at the unfairness of the current system have mounted. Having paid once to produce new scientific knowledge, funding agencies and scientists argue, why should taxpayers and charitable bodies have to pay again to use it?

The question for me is at what point do the humanities become involved in this debate? While the humanities perhaps doesn't pay for "colour illustration and reprint charge," the irony is yet the same. In regards to print publication, academic institutions are funding our research, we are then giving up our rights to the texts, and then having to pay for access to those texts. As Caulkin points out, an equally important consideration is the effect the very high price of science journals is having on library journal subscriptions where the humanities also suffers:

With relatively fixed budgets, even the world's best libraries can no longer afford to hold all the research journals. Something has to give - and often it is the journals of less powerful publishers or learned societies, which use their publishing proceeds to fund other activities. Academics believe that the knock-on effects of scientific publishing inflation have also been felt by other subject areas, such as the humanities, and even library book acquisition programmes.

Anyone who has been following the debates of over Open Access going on in scholarly literature and faculty senates (see Open Access News as the best source for catching up), knows that publisher Reed Elsevier is the epitome of the problem in the print journal model described above. That administrators and faculy senates are taking action to support open access and/or approve dropping journal subscriptions, sometimes directly citing Elsevier as the cause. Consider the following list of institutions which are either dropping subscriptions or voting for open access:Indiana University at Bloomington, Standford University, University of Maryland, and Cornell University. Note that even the student senate at NC has voted in favor of dropping journal subscriptions from Elsevier (The Latest Developments).

Given that rising journal costs does, indeed, have serious implications regarding access to scholarly texts and that open access potentially creates greater access to scholarly texts--given a computer connected to the Internet--isn't it time that we address this issue in more detail?

First posted at cyberdash.