Services
Scholarly Communication
Issues in Scholarly Communication
"In a better world, high-quality, peer reviewed information would be freely available soon after its creation; it would be digital by default, but optionally available in print for a price; it would be easy to find, and it would be available long after its creation, at a stable address, in a stable form."
- John Unsworth and Pauline Yu
Authors' Rights
UA scholarly authors own the copyright to their books and papers unless and until they assign these rights to a publisher or other party. You can retain control over access to your works by managing these copyrights yourself. One step towards this is to only sign publishing agreements that leave you in control of the future uses you want and expect.
The Open Access Directory maintains a list of authors addenda and other alternative publishing agreements. Selected approaches are highlighted in the UA LIbraries Copyright Guide. The Copyright Guide is also a resource for more informatin about copyright.
Open Access
The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities defines open access as peer reviewed literature that is freely available to the reader to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and display publically and to make and distribute derivative works subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
Open Access (OA) is a vital access model that provides for broad distribution of scholarly output and allows researchers and other authors to reach a wide readership. There are, broadly, two standard methods of achieving open access.
One method is to publish directly in open access journals. (This is often referred to as "gold OA.") The Directory of Open Access Journals lists numerous peer reviewed open access journal across all disciplines. There are several business models available to support open access publishing.
The other standard method of achieving open access (usually referred to as "green OA") is to archive publications in an open disciplinary or institutional repository. SHERPA/RoMEO lists the archiving and other copyright policies of thousands of journals.
open-access.net has a series of clever videos (in both German and English) that explain open access.
Open access as an access model is supported by a variety of business models. This leaves an opening for abuse. Jeffrey Beale has pulled together a list of Predatory, Open Access Publishers who exploit the author-pays business model for their profit with little care for peer review or other checks on quality.
Open Educational Resources (OER)
Open educational resources spur innovation and knowledge creation both for independent learners and in the classroom by allowing teachers and students to adapt and build upon resources to meet their specific needs. OER Commons offers over 30,000 openly licensed instructional materials free for students or instructors to use for a broad range of teaching and learning needs. Materials are searchable by topic and grade level.
The Open Courseware Consortium, which started at MIT and now has members worldwide, is another site with a wide range of openly available resources as well as news about open courseware activities.
Open Repositories
Disciplinary and institutional repositories host a range of openly available resources for reading and re-use. The Directory of Open Access Repositories has over 2,000 listings of repostories around the world. The University of Arizona Campus Repository is a growing resource.
- Publisher mergers yield higher prices
- Library purchasing power cannot keep up with price increases
| ! You write papers and you review them, but you and your library have to pay for them. |
What UA faculty can do:
- Create and support competitive alternatives to the present costly system, such as institutional and other open repositories.
- Publish in, review for, and support journals with reasonable pricing models including open access journals.
- Move too costly journals to university presses or scholarly societies.
- Retain copyrights. Do not sign away all of your rights to the publisher. Faculty can reserve some or all rights to republish or copy their own works, resulting in increased freedom to use your work for teaching and research.
- Influence the publishers. Examine the pricing, copyright, and licensing agreements for any commercial journal that you contribute to as an author, an editor, or a reviewer. If you are the editor of a costly journal, move the journal to a nonprofit publisher or resign your editorship and work with a less costly journal.
- Support open access journals and self archiving. Open access and self archiving increase access while maintaining quality.
Contact
Dan Lee,
Director, Office of Copyright Management & Scholarly Communication
(520) 621-6433
leed@email.arizona.edu