Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Mar 19, 2010, 10:44 AM

Relentless optimism has served me well as practice and as a politics.  I'm reminded of this, yet again, by this nice comment by Kevin Smith in his blog on our new Open Access policy at Duke:  "One thing that librarians often believe is that faculty will only be motivated for open access by their own self-interest — impact, citation and the like.  But yesterday Cathy Davidson made an eloquent plea for greater access for people around the world who are blocked by high subscriptions costs and other “toll-access” policies.  All round the room, heads were nodding as she spoke.  I was reminded that most faculty members genuinely do care about the overall welfare of scholarship and learning." 

Submitted by NancyKimberly on Mar 16, 2010, 11:38 AM

Yesterday the Duke Today website ran a feature story covering the open access policy at Duke University. See the full story at http://news.duke.edu/2010/03/openaccess.html

Submitted by whitneyt on Mar 16, 2010, 11:12 AM

Cathy recently blogged about Duke's proposed open access policy, which would create a freely accessible digital archive of work by Duke faculty. I'd like to bring another experiment in "open access" to the HASTAC community's attention: the open review process going on right now at Shakespeare Quarterly.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Sep 15, 2009, 10:25 AM

Five leading universities have signed a compact that subsidies open access journals---and that will have an impact and repercussions throughout the worlds of scholarly publishing and in provost's offices everywhere. Today, I'm meeting with Duke's own Digital Futures Taskforce about our own draft open access policy and we hope also to discuss this new development. There's a great piece with more detail and links on Inside Higher Education.

Here's the url: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/15/open

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Aug 25, 2009, 08:02 AM

"Open means that there are opportunities to learn," says Curtis J. Bonk, author of The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education (Jossey-Bass) in an interview with Scott Jaschik in today's Inside Higher Education. Bonk isn't by any means arguing that the "digital divide" is now closed. Access is only as open as the society that embraces it. Still he is looking at the many different ways that higher education is making use of open access as a pedagogical model that can not only transform what we teach but our relationship, through that teaching, to the larger world--and vice versa.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jun 29, 2009, 04:15 PM

LAWRENCE ? The University of Kansas has become the nation?s first public university to adopt an ?open access? policy that makes its faculty?s scholarly journal articles available for free online.

The move aligns KU with Harvard and Stanford universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which have similar policies in place.

Scholarly articles ? the method by which a professor presents original research results ? normally are published in peer-reviewed journals and available only through paid subscriptions. Under the new faculty-initiated policy approved by Chancellor Robert Hemenway, digital copies of all articles produced by the university?s professors will be housed in KU ScholarWorks, an existing digital repository for scholarly work created by KU faculty and staff in 2005. KU ScholarWorks houses more than 4,400 articles submitted in digital formats that assure their long-term preservation.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jun 04, 2009, 10:29 AM

Scott Jaschik has a new piece in INSIDE HIGHER ED on "The Split Over Open Access." Here's the url: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/04/open

 

Some University Press publishers signed a petition in favor of open access. Others argued that they believe in the principle but their universities hold them accountable to a bottom line as if they are businesses---and you cannot be expected to make a profit AND be expected to give away your only marketable product for free. This is the dilemma, and it is one that is also the subjet of Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Anderson is also the editor of Wired Magazine and the author of The Long Tail. He is concerned (as I have been in many essays, columns, and blogs over the last decade) with the inherent contradictions in the idea that "information wants to be free" when it costs something to produce that information. Who pays the price of consumer's "free" choices? And, in the scholarly world, if we are evaluated on our publications, if our universities insist that our scholarly publishers break even, and yet if we want them to give away their products for free, who profits in the long run and who suffers? These are very important questions.

 

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jun 03, 2009, 08:15 PM
Lessons from Maryland

On April 23, 2009, the University Senate at the University of Maryland voted 37-24 to reject a proposed OA policy.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/04/faculty-votes-against-oa-policy-at.html

A really brilliant account by Peter Suber of the Open Access vote and some of the major issues at University of Maryland, publish by SPARC Open Access Newsletter, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/06-02-09.htm : "The defeated policy would have encouraged green OA (deposit in the institutional repository), encouraged gold OA (submission to OA journals), and required neither.

Is the Maryland vote ominous or anomalous? Either way, supporters of OA should try to understand it. Whatever its causes, they could arise again elsewhere. At the same time, we should understand why many stronger OA policies have been accepted at other campuses. . . . "

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Apr 22, 2008, 05:00 PM
SCIENCE 2.0 -- IS OPEN ACCESS SCIENCE THE FUTURE?