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June 29, 2009, 03:52 PM ET
U. of Kansas to Make Research Available Free Online
The University of Kansas will make more of its faculty research free to the public online.
“The University of Kansas has been interested in reforming what has been kind of a dysfunctional system of scholarly communication for years,” said Ada Emmett, an associate librarian at the university. “People fundamentally agree with providing the widest possible access to our scholarship.”
The university already has over 4,400 articles in its digital repository of scholarly work, ScholarWorks, which was opened in 2005. Any new research will be added to that collection, and Ms. Emmett estimated that anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 articles are published by the university each year. She will oversee a task force to administer the program. The plan has not yet been finalized, but she hopes it will be in place by next year.
After Harvard University passed a similar plan last February, faculty members at the University of Kansas began to research how they could adopt one.
In April the University of Maryland rejected a plan to allow for open access to its research journals. Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College and a longtime promoter of open access to scholarly publishing, wrote that the reason many of the faculty voted against the plan was because they feared that the policy would limit the freedom of professors to submit work to journals, or that it would harm subscriptions to other journals, and that there was no specified opt-out clause. The University of Maryland’s proposal was not a mandate, but a suggestion.
“Ironically, because the Maryland policy mandated nothing, there was no need to build in a waiver provision,” Mr. Suber wrote. “Hence, no one could point to an explicit waiver option to answer fears that encouragement might harden into an expectation.”
A. Townsend Peterson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, said that similar issues arose there but that after the faculty members were able to ask questions of the university senate, their fears of publishing restrictions were dispelled. Faculty members can request a waiver if they do not want their work to be used, he said.
“Anybody who is in academia should be aware of and concerned about the commercialization of academic publication,” Mr. Peterson said. “Academic communication should not be about typing in your credit-card number. It should be something we’re trying to share globally.”—Marc Beja
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