The first weeks of grad school are always the craziest; stress and more stress, so please excuse any lack of coherence. I really enjoyed some of the example blogs, particularly A Wandering Eyre (what can I say, I love English lit, and I found the LITA issues thought provoking) and Information Wants to Be Free (team leadership, and the usefulness or lack thereof of our fun Lib 2.0 toys.)

Did anyone else find the readings on open access alternately encouraging and really disappointing?  I found myself cheering Miriam Drake’s main points. Most science/medical/technology research is funded by public monies and should be available to the public without the prohibitively expense costs of the current publication model and without the difficulties of access. The technology exists to make the research readily available via the web, and some successful examples exist (see BioMedCentral.) Institutional repositories are providing author archiving for separate institutions and consortia of colleges and universities.

I come from the corporate world myself; that’s why the traditional publishing model (so far mostly insulated from market forces) galls me, especially since publishers don’t guarantee permanent access other than in print form. According to Raym Crow in his SPARC position paper on institutional repositories, the declining costs of digital publishing technologies have not been reflected in the pricing models of traditional publishers, while the opportunity costs and traditional barriers to entry in the market have fallen with digital technologies.  The rationale for a new model exists, if the academy will accept it. 

I can understand the reluctance of publishers to give up the gravy train, but I was very surprised to see how little support exists in the academy. I had lunch on Friday with a colleague who currently works at Rice, and she brought up the difficulties her library has in getting the faculty to make use of the institutional repository. Rice has been actively involved in the open source content movement. You might want to check out Connexions (cnx.org), an online environment for “collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the web.” The Rice president, provost, and dean of engineering are all listed as supporters on the site. However- tenure is still determined by publication in the traditional print venues, and very few seem to be willing (yet) to trust their career to the judgment of open source publications, no matter how distinguished the peer-review process. What a shame!  It is clear that the components of scholarly communication (registration, certification, awareness, and archiving) can and have been achieved by the open-source model. I think the impetus for change will be driven by the funders of scholarly research (mostly government entities such as the NSF, NIH, etc.) mandating author archiving or open source publication. Be sure to email your representatives! As librarians we can only encourage faculties to take advantage of institutional repositories and make them aware of the greater exposure open access publications receive because of higher rates of citation (see Crow’s position paper.)