Open access, publisher embargoes, and the voluntary nature of scholarship: An analysis

Abstract

T his has been a banner year for open access, and the momentum shows no sign of letting up.College and university faculties, and the granting agencies that fund a significant amount of their research, are increasingly embracing open access to ensure research findings across disciplines are freely accessible to the public and the global research community.On the college and university level, several institutional open access policies have been passed this year by faculties at schools such as Amherst College, The College of Wooster, University of Rhode Island, and Oregon State University, as well as the entire University of California system. 1 On the federal level, the White House Office of Science and Technology Planning (OSTP) issued a memorandum in February directing all agencies with research and development budgets over $100 million to develop plans for requiring public access to articles and data generated by the research they fund.This directive impacts most of the major granting agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, and the Department of Agriculture.Earlier this year, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act was introduced in Congress, which would make provisions similar to the OSTP directive a part of federal law.State legislatures in California and New York also considered bills that would require public access to state-funded research.In August, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a bill that requires each of the state's public universities to create an open access task force with the goal of making its research available to the public online and free of charge.Academic libraries are key contributors to the success of the open access movement.Their influence is manifested in a variety of ways, including advocating for institutional and funder open access policies, consulting with faculty on open access publishing and copyright issues, and managing institutional repositories that provide public access to faculty and student research.Institutional repositories are a primary vehicle through which "green" open access occurs by virtue of scholars depositing the accepted manuscript versions of their published articles.This method contrasts with "gold" open access in which a journal, or selected articles within a journal in the so-called hybrid model, is freely accessible on the Web, but authors are often charged publication fees instead of the publisher selling subscriptions.These article processing charges are typically found in for-profit journals but are not as common in journals published by nonprofit entities.Within the context of green open access, there are some troubling trends in the current dynamic among institutional repositories, institutional open access policies, and reactive Shan C.

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