Professor Fitpatrick will be speaking at the Photonics Center in room 206 from 3:00-5:00 . If you would like to learn more about her work or Open Access on a whole, check out BU’s Open Access website.

Are there downsides to Open Access? According to publishing companies, yes. The Association of American Publishers has launched a lobby in opposition to the OA movement. The main argument against OA is that it would impose government intervention on a private-sector industry, which would negatively affect the research and peer-review process. The lobby’s scheme has been met with widespread skepticism as an effort to protect publishing companies’ self interests, rather than promote the integrity of the journals.

Regardless of the sentiment you may share with The Association of American Publishers, their argument brings us to consider the deeper implications of Open Access. As you may recall from the previous post, Money Matters, publications under Open Access often rely on donations and sponsorship. It would be the reader’s job to consider how the source of means may alter the end product. Say you are researching the health hazards of genetically engineered crops and you find a published article concluding that genetically engineered crops are actually more nutritious than their counterparts. Great! But then you notice that a company that makes its profits on patenting genetically engineered seeds sponsored the publication. That leaves readers in the position to determine whether they think an article is trustworthy or presents a conflict of interests.

Open Access has incredible potential. But before we lead the OA crusade, we need to grasp all of the implications of the movement.

One of the first questions to arise regarding Open Access is how journals will be financially feasible if no one is paying to access them. Online publishing companies have to meet their overhead costs, and while the cost of access is the most obvious answer, there many other means of income.

There are already 3,000 peer-reviewed journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals.  They operate without any subscription costs, relying instead on a variety of incomes, including endowment, advertising, and sponsorship. Journals do not need to charge costly subscriptions if they pursue alternative sources of income. You get free information, journals can still support themselves, and everybody benefits.

Inspiration and information from the Right to Research‘s Brochure, a student-oriented site associated with SPARC — an organization that sponsors Open Access Week and seeks to settle the playing field for access to scholarly publications. Check out their sites for more information about what you can do as a student.

“BU’s biggest Open Access initiative is the Digital Common, which was launched Open Access Week of 2009. The Digital Common is a repository for faculty to make their articles available without subscription. This is an ever-expanding medium for university faculty, graduate students, or undergraduates to share information and learn from one another.”

BU has also provided a platform for publishing Open Access journals and resources for developing Open Access business models. BU libraries are working to make all this information available more publicly, but they are also archiving it so that students 100 years from now will have access to the same materials we do.

“In addition to these efforts, BU has a collection of resources for authors that help them understand copyright. “When an article is published in a scholarly journal,” Jack informed me, “the author gives up copyright of their article to the journal, which then has total control over the article. Currently, most BU faculty is unaware of how to retain copyright. In educating them on these issues, we are giving them the tools to maintain the open access model but still get published in major journals.”

So now, dear readers, we can all rest easy: BU is in fact striving to make Open Access a reality, because as corny as the mantra may sound, everyone should have free and easy access to scholarly information.

Music scholarship has a long tradition of international cooperation, the fruits of which have borne works like RISM – a nearly universal catalog of all manuscript and early printed music sources from 1500-1800.  This project called upon support from 26 autonomous national groups for materials – a pretty massive infrastructure for a collection of books.¹ As such, music scholars have been quick to adopt Open Access in a number ways, useful to the casual musician and scholar alike.

The first and most universally useful of Open Access sources is the International Music Score Library Program, or IMSLP.  This project calls for submissions of music scores and recordings released from copyright.  That means that the music from nearly every composer preceding the 20th century is already available for free access online.  This project is far from complete, but the amount of work accomplished over the last few years has been astronomical.  Over the past four years, the IMSLP has ammassed 30,359 works, 75,446 scores · 1,206 recordings · 4,394 composers, editors, and arrangers.² As a wiki based project, IMSLP takes submissions of open-access music from anyone.

A more specialized project has been underway since 1998 at the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music. At this archive, specialized musicologists submit high quality digital images of original manuscript and early print sources dating from 880 – 1550.  While not useful to a general musical audience, the scores offered at this archive represent digital copies of (often) one of a kind sources – saving anyone studying the source a possible trip across the world to access the original from the host library.  Plus, some of the manuscripts are gorgeous creations full of life and character – completely unlike any music printed today.

A great deal of other sources of Open Access music are accessible to any BU student.  Just give the Music Library’s page a visit and check out their subject guides.

Footnotes:

1. Benton, Rita. “Répertoire International des Sources Musicales.” In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, URL.

2. Statistic provided by IMSLP Homepage.

But wait!

You can’t read it. You can only read the abstract, or maybe just an excerpt or two. But that opportunity for an awesome source for your bibliography just slips out from your fingertips. You are, all of sudden, halted in your tracks in terms of research.

So this might be an exaggerated version of what happens over the course of a few seconds. And this might not always be the case for you, as a BU student, because we are fortunate to have access to many scholarly journals and articles. Unfortunately, not every university, college, or even high school, have the same funds to provide such access to the many journals that are out there. Thousands of dollars, literally thousands, are spent every year for the subscriptions to these journals.

Should we exclude the potential ground-breaking thinkers who could contribute the growing collection of knowledge just because their institution cannot afford a subscription? What if you were that person with so many ideas and you wanted to see what else was out there, to expand on other people’s findings? Wouldn’t you be a little bit annoyed that you were being denied information, from maybe one article, maybe hundreds? Thousands? Millions?

As the Open Access site correctly points out, the internet has vastly changed the way information is exchanged and disseminated to a large number of people. It provides near-infinite amounts of information and knowledge with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks. Why should knowledge from reputable journals not follow this same principle? Shouldn’t everyone be able to have access to research, to literary criticism, to anything else those journals can provide? We’re children of the internet generation; we have grown up knowing that all information should be available to us, and if it isn’t, then we do something to change it.

These questions are supposed to make you think, and thus, take action.

Inspiration and information from the Right to Research‘s Brochure, a student-oriented site associated with SPARC — an organization that sponsors Open Access Week and seeks to settle the playing field for access to scholarly publications. Check out their sites for more information about what you can do as a student.

Watch this video to see why Open Access matters to you. This film is produced by the Anita Greene Student Working Group of Boston University Libraries.

Credit to: Olivia Kimmel, Dimitri Kouri, Zack McGeehan and Jason Weitzman

Presently many scholarly essays are owned by journals that are very expensive to subscribe to; some of these subscriptions cost as much as $20,000 a year. Boston University Libraries subscribe to these research journals so that students have access to the most advanced and cutting-edge research, which helps BU maintain its standing as a top research university. The cost of these subscriptions is covered in your tuition. So theoretically if these journals and research are made available for free online, the cost of tuition would go down because our library would not have to pay for costly subscriptions to closed access publications.

You may not know this but many of your professors are required by the university to conduct research and publish information and essays in journals. The professors and scholars sell their research and essays to journals, and then scholarly journals sell this information back to schools and organizations through subscriptions. Open Access promotes the notion that professors should publish their work in Open Access journals so that the school does not have to buy back the essays and journals via expensive subscriptions.

Universities like BU and other scholarly institutions are promoting Open Access to create awareness about its benefits. Hopefully more people will push for Open Access. If more researchers publish essays in Open Access journals more information is shared. If more people support Open Access then less people will rely on expensive subscriptions to obtain high quality research.

The research and information is out there, but it’s not accessible to everyone. In addition to benefitting students, Open Access helps people all over the world who want to learn from the most current research.

To find out more be sure to check this blog throughout the week. Also you can check out OpenAccessWeek.org for information about Open Access Week and Open Access in general. To find out what BU is doing check out http://www.bu.edu/dioa/.