“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,” according to a press release the university issued June 26. The policy was initiated by the KU faculty and approved by the chancellor.
The articles will be available through the digital repository KU ScholarWorks.
Today, Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX) reintroduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a bill to ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies. The bill covers unclassified research funded by the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Transportation as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation.
Directors of ten university presses issued a statement supporting “the dissemination of scholarly research as broadly as possible.” Represented were University Press of Florida, University of Akron Press, University Press of New England, Athabasca University Press, Wayne State University Press, University of Calgary Press, University of Michigan Press, Rockefeller University Press, Penn State University Press, and University of Massachusetts Press.
Further details are available in Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Salvatore Engel-DiMauro, professor of geography at the State University of New York at New Paltz, urged attendees at the recent annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors to seek out non-profit publishing options for their work, rather than those owned by corporations and run as for-profit businesses.
His argument was that academics and universities shouldn’t provide a “product” for these corporations for free, which university libraries are then forced to buy back via subscriptions or licenses to often high-priced journals. Furthermore, open-access, non-profit options often broaden access to and use of their research. The full article appeared in Inside Higher Ed.
