Walk the Talk: Open Access and Academic Libraries

Driven to near despair by the ever increasing cost of scholarship, particularly the growing expense of scientific journal subscriptions, Mary Case and I, way back in 1998, wrote an article for Notices of the American Mathematical Society with the highfalutin title of " Reforming Scholarly Publishing in the Sciences. " In it we argued that scientists, working with librarians and professional societies, needed to keep their scholarship within the " circle of the academy " so that we could fully exploit " the archival and distribution potential of new digital information technology. " We were trying to find new ways of doing business in scholarly publishing, and we were not alone in thinking about this. Just a year before, the Association of Research Libraries created SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) whose mission was to be a catalyst for the creation of a more competitive marketplace for scholarly publishing and to be an advocate for fair and ethical uses of scholarship. Back then the concept of " open access " as a new way of doing business was hardly on anyone's radar, but in the ensuing decade, SPARC and a dedicated group of scholars, librarians, and even some publishers rallied around the practice of making scholarship freely available over the Internet. Peter Suber has been tireless in documenting the growth and development of the open access movement through his Open Access News blog (which ceased recently, a victim of its own success) and the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries), the publisher of this journal, has seen its Scholarly Communications Committee become an active and effective supporter of open access and scholarly publishing reform through its Walk the Talk: Open Access and Academic Libraries successful institutes, toolkit, and the marketing of the Create Change Web site. Today, The Directory of Open Access Journals lists almost five thousand open access journals in operation. The publishers represented there have created open access business models for themselves, often looking to research funders or institutions rather than to subscribers to bear the cost of publication. Also, many traditional for-profit and non-profit publishers are turning " green, " allowing their authors to post copies of their articles in institutional and disciplinary open access repositories. Major government agencies such as the US National Institutes of Health, influential foundations including the Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and leading universities …