Changing the game

[Jennifer McLennan <jennifer@arl.org>]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 24, 2009

CHANGING THE GAME:
PIONEERS REPORT ON EFFORTS TO SUPPORT OPEN-ACCESS  PUBLICATION

Washington, DC -- Last year, the University of California at 
Berkeley and the University of Calgary were among a handful of 
institutions that established pools of money, through their 
libraries, to cover the cost of open-access journal fees. This 
approach -- aimed at supporting a new academic publishing model 
that could ultimately relieve at least some of the burden of 
expensive journal subscriptions -- has found a receptive audience 
among researchers on these two campuses.

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) 
is highlighting two approaches to establishing and maintaining 
open-access funds in a new SPARC Member Profile. SPARC is also 
preparing to launch a new initiative to provide additional 
information and resources detailing options for other 
institutions that may be considering such funds.

"Reporting on the progress and challenges associated with 
innovative new approaches to sharing research results is a 
fundamental component of building change in scholarly 
communication," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. 
"These two SPARC members have learned valuable lessons in 
establishing their funds and fighting for faculty attention, and 
we are grateful to them for sharing the details. We hope the 
wider community will join us online to build on these successes, 
share some more experiences, and contribute to what promises to 
be a deep and engaging discussion."

At UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) 
provides faculty, post-doc and graduate students up to $3,000 to 
cover the cost of publishing an article in an open-access 
publication -- and up to $1,500 for opening an article that 
requires copyright transfer to the publisher. During the 18-month 
pilot project, the fund covered 52 articles at an average cost of 
$1,500 for open-access publications and $1,280 for articles 
requiring copyright transfer. During Calgary's first 13 months, 
the library's Open Access Authors Fund received 67 official 
submissions to cover open-access fees at an average cost of 
$1,538 (in Canadian dollars).

The cost of journal subscriptions at times is crippling for 
libraries and the Canadian university wanted to experiment with a 
different way of encouraging Open Access. "With money for Open 
Access coming from the library, we are trying to change the 
model," says Andrew Waller, serials librarian in Collection 
Services, Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of 
Calgary.

When David Ackerly, associate professor of integrative biology at 
UC Berkeley wanted to publish a paper about the potential impact 
of climate change on plants of California, he turned to the 
library to cover the fee to publish in PLoS One, an initiative of 
the Public Library of Science. "I absolutely wanted the results 
to be freely available to the press, state agencies and others 
who don't necessarily have access to the libraries and journals," 
he says. "It really paid off.  When it was published, we got 
great press coverage."

The Berkeley initiative set out to encourage a more sustainable 
scholarly communication environment. "We shouldn't be beholden to 
a single fund-flow model supporting journal publishing," says 
Chuck Eckman, associate university librarian and director of 
collections at the UC Berkeley Library.  In addition, Eckman 
suggests, "It is really important for academic libraries to forge 
relationships with research offices and think about their 
respective and complementary roles in the broader community of 
authors and readers."

To read more about the UC Berkeley or University of Calgary 
open-access efforts visit the SPARC Web site at 
http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications. The new SPARC resource for 
open-access funds will be announced this fall.

###

SPARC
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), 
with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance 
of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to 
create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC?s 
advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs 
encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is on the Web 
at http://www.arl.org/sparc.

-------------------------------------
Jennifer McLennan
Director of Communications
SPARC