Achieving Open Access: Alternatives To Author Charges

(Via RLG ShelfLife) The dream of researchers and scholars is to see true open access to scholarly journals -- freely available, immediate electronic access to published, peer-reviewed research articles. And while examples of open access journals do exist, Yale University Science Libraries proposes that the model of using "author charges" as an alternative to traditional subscriptions is flawed for a variety of reasons. One of Yale's proposals is to reconsider the entire "publish or perish" focus of the promotion and tenure process -- not a new idea by any means; a great article, "To Publish and Perish," written by the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable laid a good case for this in 1998 and many earlier examples abound. The argument is that the existing tenure system encourages unlimited scholarly publication, and enormous numbers of editorial boards with little guarantee of quality control from many commercial operations. Ideally, if papers were only being written and published because their authors truly had something to say, everybody would benefit.

Posted by Tom on September 02, 2004