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Open Access Week at Penn State Libraries - Fall 2012
Open Access Week at Penn State Libraries - Fall 2011
Besides the guidance provided below, important principles of Open Access may be found in Peter Suber's "Open Access Overview". The website for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) also presents a helpful framework for understanding Open Access.
S. Lawrence. (2001). "Online or invisible?" Nature, 411 (No. 6837), p. 521; preprint of this article
Open access--sometimes referred to as OA--may be defined as a mode of publication or distribution of research results that limits or removes payments, fees, licensing, or other barriers to readers’ access to research reports, journal articles, conference proceedings, books, or any other type of scholarly literature or research product. Although many of the best known discussions of open access focus on scientific, medical, and technology research, open access publishing occurs in any subject area.
OA publishing requires non-traditional business models to pay the costs of publishing because the usual modes of payment, such as subscriptions, are eliminated or minimized. Some publications offset costs by requiring authors to pay publication charges after their manuscript has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication. In other models, the publishers are building endowments or ask for financial support from the communities that most benefit from their work.
The National Institutes of Health's Public Access Policy requires researchers to deposit any publication resulting from NIH funding into PubMed Central, which will make the work freely available to the public 12 months after its publication. Over 1,000 journals make this deposit on behalf of the author. The Harrell Health Sciences Library provides details on the NIH Public Access Manuscript Submission process (link: http://www.pennstatehershey.org/web/library/resources/pathfinders/pmc).
The University Libraries have supported high-quality OA publications or services that are important to the Penn State community. In a few cases there is a specific benefit to Penn State authors. However, the Libraries do not directly pay publishing charges for open access publishing. The list below shows examples of Open Access publications offered at Penn State.
PLoS publishes seven biomedical journals fully open access, and its website provides access to a range of related blogs, data, and information designed to share research findings rapidly. Penn State Libraries has paid for an Institutional Membership, which earns Penn State researchers a 10% discount off of PLoS standard author publication charges.
BioMed Central is an open access publishing division of Springer, publishing over 200 journal titles primarily in biomedical fields. Penn State Libraries has paid for a Supporter Membership, which earns Penn State researchers a 15% discount off of standard author publication charges.
These discounts apply to any title published by BioMed Central, Chemistry Central, and PhysMath Central. Journals published under the Springer Open imprint also offer this discount.
arXiv.org, the pre-publication service covers the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, nonlinear sciences, quantitative biology and statistics. Cornell University Library, which has hosted arXiv, funds about 15% of its operating costs. Based on Penn State's usage of the arXiv, the Libraries joined more than 120 other institutions from 11 nations to provide annual financial support to keep it viable.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is a highly-respected reference work voluntarily written, edited, and staffed by experts in their fields. Stanford University has provided administrative and hosting support since 1995, and the project has received grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Penn State Libraries has contributed as a Full Member to an endowment for support of the Encyclopedia.
