Open access is in the air. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, a national laboratory managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, just announced that all of its scientists have to place their published journal articles in OpenSky, a new digital repository that will be open to anyone who wants to read those articles.
Well, not completely open. “The repository will be free and available to the public, but access to the works it contains will depend upon the policies of their publishers,” the laboratory and its managing corporation said in a written statement.
What that really means, says Mary Marlino, director of the center’s library, is that the repository will be open, but some articles will be closed. “We will honor publishers’ embargoes,” she says. Major journal publishers — in this field, they are the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society – insist that articles they publish remain available only to subscribers for months or years after publication. “So we will keep that publication ‘dark,’” Ms. Marlino says.
But such closed journals will probably lose some authors. The two organizations’ journals used to be be the leading publications for authors at the laboratory, Ms. Marlino says, but “when I looked back over the last nine months, it was Copernicus, an open-access journal publisher.” Clearly, she says, “the open-access train has left the station, and it’s not turning back.”
