Open access publishing beginning to see what is happening, more scholars/researchers are affected, and the This essay outlines the history and development phrase “open access” is coined in the Budapest of open access publishing from the author’s Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2002. This perspective, and it advocates librarians take a Initiative is/was an attempt to see how much an more active role in making open access organization called the Open Society Institute publishing a norm for facilitating scholarly (OSI) could help resolve the scholarly communication as opposed to an exception. communication. One of the outcomes of this attempt was a definition of open access: History By “open access” to this [scientific and scholarly] literature, we mean its fee The history of open access publishing has been availability on the public internet, woven with strands from the serials pricing permitting any users to read, download, crisis and the development on the Internet. copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them You might say Stevan Harnad has been a for indexing, pass them as data to driving force behind open access publishing for software, or use them for any other lawful more than ten years now, and in his purpose, without financial, legal, or “subversive proposal” posted to a Virginia technical barriers other than those Tech mailing list in 1994 is a landmark in the inseparable from gaining access to the history of open access. In a nutshell, it advocated internet itself. The only constraint on the continuance of peer-reviewed scholarly reproduction and distribution, and the publishing in print form but it also advocated only role for copyright in this domain scholarly articles be digitally self-archived by should be to give authors control over the authors and made freely available through the integrity of their work and the right to be Internet, much like the online network of pre- properly acknowledged and cited. -- print archives of the physics community lead by Budapest, Hungary (February 14, 2002) Paul Ginsparg: The BOAI goes on to become the model for other The scholarly author wants only to open archive statements such as the Bethesda publish them [, the articles], that is, to Statement on Open Access Publishing, the Berlin reach the eyes and minds of peers, fellow Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge, the esoteric scientists and scholars the world ACRL Principles and Strategies for the Reform over, so that they can build on one of Scholarly Communication, and the IFLA another’s contributions in that Statement on Open Access to Research Data cumulative... If every esoteric author in from Public Funding. All the while there are a the world this very day established a small but growing “independence statements” globally accessible local ftp archive for from journal article editors/staff as well as every piece of esoteric writing from this formal statements from large and larger day forward, the long-heralded transition institutions of higher education as some of them from paper publication to purely move away from the Big Deal. electronic publication (of esoteric research) would follow suit almost Most recently, governments are now hearing the immediately... The subversion will be problems. The United States government is a bit complete, because the (esoteric -- no- behind times, compared to other countries, but market) peer-reviewed literature will have on September 17 the Federal Register recorded a taken to the airwaves, where it always notice by the National Institute of Health belonged, and those airwaves will be free (NIH) in support of open access: (to the benefit of us all) because their true minimal expenses will be covered the The NIH intends to request that its optimal way for the unimpeded flow of grantees and supported Principal esoteric knowledge to all: In advance. -- Investigators provide the NIH with Stevan Harnad (June 27, 1994) electronic copies of all final version manuscripts upon acceptance for Serial prices continue to rise. Other things in publication if the research was supported libraries continue to get cut. More people are in whole or in part by NIH funding. This would include all research grants, Besides implementing these traditional cooperative agreements, and contracts, as processes, libraries, in order to be part of the well as National Research Service Award solution, must build stronger relationships with (NRSA) fellowships. We define final scholars and publishers. Most importantly, manuscript as the author’s version scholars and publishers need to trust librarians. resulting after all modifications due to the They need to feel confident that librarians can peer review process.... The NIH considers hold up their end of the bargain. “If I publish my final manuscripts to be an important stuff electronically, will you, librarian, do the record of the research funded by the things you do best for the materials I create?” Government and will archive these They answer has to be a definitive “Yes”, and it manuscripts and any appropriate has to be backed up by action. SPARC, the supplementary information in PubMed recently formed SPARC Europe, the activities Central (PMC), NIH’s digital repository they sponsor, and other national activities are for biomedical research. great starts, but more has to happen on the local level. Conversations have to take place. A sincere Librarianship appreciation of what everybody (scholars, publishers, and librarians) desires need to be I like to boil librarianship down to a handful of shared and taken to heart. As Frazier said, processes surrounding data, information, and scholarly publishing has been turned upside- knowledge, namely: collection, organization, down, and in order to turn it right-side up again, archiving and preservation, and dissemination. each one of us needs to take some sort of action. Technically speaking, collection is easy, almost Conclusion trivial. Libraries can use mirroring techniques to simply copy data from one location to another. In summary, the open access movement has Using OAI-PMH to collect the metadata is the been fermenting for at least a decade. It is the next best thing. Organization is a bit more combined result of and reactions to the “serials difficult, but much of traditional cataloging can pricing crisis” and the development of globally come into play. The issues of archiving and networked computers -- the Internet. Librarians preservation have not been ironed out. are seen by scholars, open access journal LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) publishers, and administrators as partners in the provides one solution, but migrating data from scholarly communications process. As partners one format to another will almost undoubtably librarians must learn to COAPP with the be a part of the long-term solution. problem: Dissemination is the hardest problem. Successful indexing techniques are only as good Collect open access journal literature as the structure of the underlying data; if the Organize open access journal literature indexing is poor, then search will not be so great. Archive open access journal literature Librarians might consider providing the meta Preserve open access journal literature data for open access literature or help devise Provide access to open access journal literature systems for deriving meta data automatically. Dissemination does not stop with indexing and These are exciting times in the world of data, search. The wealth of data/information available information, and knowledge. There are so many on the Web have increased people’s expectations opportunities. It is an exciting time to be a when it comes to information retrieval. People librarian. expect Google-esk simplicity and Amazon.com- like services. At the same time and at the risk of sounding passee, everybody is still “drinking Eric Lease Morgan from the fire hose”. What people desire are ways Universitiy Libraries of Notre Dame to manage their information and put it to use. We need to ask ourselves, “What can we do to October 19, 2004 help learners, teachers, and scholars turn there data and information into knowledge and wisdom?” This is the real challenge here in the early 21st Century..