Panelists

Thursday, January 3, 2013, 4-7pmBoston Marriott Copley Place

Ellen Duranceau

(MIT Libraries Program Manager for Scholarly Publishing and Licensing)Open Access at MIT: Implementation and Impact

 

Provides an overview of the implementation of the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, including how it works legally and logistically and what the success and impact has been to date. Summarizes the ways libraries support open access on campus, including implementing open access policies, offering open access publishing funds, negotiating contracts with journal publishers to enable author rights, hosting open access journals, and helping to build open textbooks.

[ slides ]

Kai von Fintel

(MIT, founding co-editor of Semantics & Pragmatics)Taking an Open Access Start-up Journal to the Next Level

 

S&P, an eLanguage open access journal, has become firmly established as one of the top venues in semantics and pragmatics. I will discuss measures of its success, the challenges it faces now, and our plans for the future. I will also discuss why we think that open access journals have an important role to play in the transition to a new model of scholarly communication.

[ slides ] [ handout ]

Lindsay Whaley

(Dartmouth Linguistics, founding co-editor of Linguistic Discovery)Sustaining Open Access Journals

 

Linguistic Discovery, an open access journal for research on lesser-studied and endangered languages, is celebrating its tenth year. I will briefly describe the history of the journal and then outline several of the challenges to sustaining e-journals such as Linguistic Discovery. These include editorial succession, editorial and technical support with limited revenue streams, and engaging scholars from around the world.

[ slides ]

Alyson Reed

(Executive Director of the LSA)Exploring Business Models for Open Access at the LSA

 

In recent years, the LSA has experimented with open access publishing under the auspices of eLanguage, while continuing to publish its flagship journal, Language, under a paid subscription model. Over the past year, the LSA has sought to develop a viable business model for sustaining its open access publishing activities, while expanding access to Language for those who are not members or paid subscribers. Ms. Reed will discuss the various options explored by the "business models working group," which was appointed by the LSA Executive Committee to formulate recommendations in this critical area of the LSA's operations.

[ slides ]

Kathleen Fitzpatrick

(MLA Director of Scholarly Communications)Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Societies

 

Scholarly societies have traditionally supported themselves through membership dues, and the publications of societies have been considered member benefits; a scholar who joins the association receives a subscription. Most societies have further supplemented those member dues with income from institutional subscriptions to society journals. In recent years, as the financial situation faced by many societies has darkened (as have such situations across the academy), they've faced difficult choices about how to maintain their publications, and how to maintain the revenue that has been used to support other vital association activities. Today, however, those choices are being challenged by the increasing drive among many scholars to open access to publications. How can an organization based around the notion of creating value specifically for its members respond to increasing pressures to make its work publicly accessible? This talk will explore experiments currently being conducted by a few societies, as well as further experiments that should be conducted, in seeking new business models for scholarly societies, and new relationships within those societies to the work of scholarly communication.

[ text (from C&RL News) ]

Stuart Shieber

(Harvard Computer Science, Director of Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication)Why Open Access is Better for Scholarly Societies

 

I will argue that a scholarly ecosystem where open-access journals predominate over toll-access journals is better for scholarly societies than a continuation of the status quo in which the converse holds.

[ slides ] [ text (from The Occasional Pamphlet) ]

Vika Zafrin

(Boston University Institutional Repository Librarian)Getting an Institutional Repository Off the Ground

 

Hundreds of large and small decisions go into populating an institutional repository with materials. In an institution with 4500 faculty, where do you start? Ultimately, all available options lead to — or at least through — permissions. I will talk about open access as it relates to the operation of BU's institutional repository and other library activities. I will touch on our conversations with publishers, author and librarian education around open access issues, university community response to our Open Access Week activities, and the role of academic libraries in OA advocacy.

[ slides ] [ text ]

Eric Bakovic

(UC San Diego Linguistics, session co-organizer)Generalizing Openness: More Suggestions for the Future of Scholarly Publishing

 

Our professional academic labor is called for at many and diverse stages in the process of scholarly publication: research, writing, peer review, revision, and editorial work. The promise of open access is to make the fruits of this labor free for all to access. But publication itself is not free, and viable business models for supporting and sustaining open access ventures are thus vital. These models must of course take into account irreducible and tangible business costs; I suggest that they must also take creative risks and take into account some of the more intangible costs of our academic labor.

[ slides ]