An international celebration of open access (OA) is taking place this week. This is the second in a series of daily posts about open access. UT Libraries also has a free, online workshop today about support for OA publishing at UT.
Yesterday, our OA Week post was about the basics of OA – what it is and why it’s important. Today, we’ll give an overview of some of the ways UT Libraries is supporting OA publishing.
The theme of OA Week this year is community over commercialization. It’s about centering the needs of the community creating and using the knowledge, rather than the needs of for-profit corporations. We know that publishing costs money whether it’s done via a subscription model or open access. UT Libraries is advocating for a scholarly communication system that is more equitable to readers and to authors, and that uses business models that are financially sustainable over the long-term. Initiatives that are solely based on a pay-as-you-go article processing charge (APC) model are not financially sustainable for us as a research intensive university. In addition, a scholarly communication system that switched from primarily subscription-based resources to primarily APC-based resources would just shift the inequity issue from readers to authors, rather than solving it altogether.
Many of the 50+ OA publishing initiatives we support are community-based or are based on business models that don’t rely strictly on APCs to fund OA publications. Some of the initiatives we support result in direct benefits to authors like APC waivers, discounts on APCs, or free OA publishing through another mechanism. We hope all of them are moving us closer to an equitable and sustainable scholarly communication system.
Our main priorities in considering an OA initiative are to:
- Provide high quality information for our users
- Have information that is easily discoverable and accessible for all users
- Support business models that:
- Give unlimited coverage for all our users and don’t impose limits on the amount that our authors can publish within a given year
- Require minimal staff time to manage the resource
- Make publishing more equitable system-wide (i.e. for UT, for society, academy, and non-profit publishers, and for authors and readers around the world).
We strive to maintain a balance of investments across subject areas, across business models, and content types (monographs, journals, data). You can find a full list of the OA initiatives we support on the Open Access LibGuide.
If you have an initiative you’d like us to consider, please email c dot lyon at austin dot utexas dot edu.
