What's New with Open Access? Find Out from City Tech Librarians

On October 19, librarians at City Tech celebrated Open Access Week. Three short presentations by library and classroom faculty preceded a lively discussion among a group of about twenty City Tech faculty.

Monica Berger, Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian, introduced the group to the concept of Open Access (OA) and outlined a brief history. According to Peter Suber, author of  the Open Access News blog, open access is “scholarly content online that is free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” Open Access began in the mid-1980s with the rise of the open-source-software movement and gained momentum as networked information proliferated throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Recently, some large research universities have decreed that their faculty’s research be accessible in OA journals or institutional repositories, and some federal agencies require that publications stemming from federally-funded research be published in OA publications.

Many Open Access articles are available as preprints, drafts that have not yet been peer-reviewed. In some disciplines, preprints take on great importance; ArXiv.org, a preprint repository for physics, mathematics, computer science, and related disciplines, is one such example. Similarly, postprints, or digital copies of post-peer-reviewed articles, are often freely accessible via institutional repositories.

The question “what’s in it for us faculty?” was addressed by Maura Smale, the library’s coordinator of Information Literacy. Authors who publish in OA journals retain copyright, including the right to share, distribute, and self-archive. Open Access provides financial advantages for institutions: for non-OA journals, universities pay twice: once to fund the research and again to purchase their libraries’ subscriptions to journals.

Patricia Cholewka, Professor of Nursing, described her own experience as an author of an article in an OA journal. She praised the relatively quick turnaround in OA publications; just three months after submission, her peer-reviewed article was published online. Her publication in the International Journal of Economic Development led to opportunities to publish in conference proceedings, which led to opportunities to edit proceedings. Because she retained copyright of her published research, she later published her articles as book chapters. She suggested that faculty scholars resist the stranglehold that for-profit publishers have on the literature of certain disciplines by seeking high-quality OA journals as venues for their publications.

Monica Berger gave all participants a tour of some places to search or browse for Open Access articles. Using Professor Neil Katz’s OA article from the Osaka Journal of Mathematics as an example, she searched DOAJ.org, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and demonstrated SFX, the library’s OpenURL link resolver that locates electronic full text from the library’s collection. The library’s list of full-text electronic journals is regularly updated to include Open Access titles.

Download the handout here.

Anne Leonard (City Tech)