A Long and Winding Road for Open Access: Are We There Yet? | Peer to Peer Review

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 10/22/2009

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The occasion of Open Access Week has led me to reflect on my personal experience with the open access movement. Like many people, I wasn't terribly aware of it except as a vague and theoretical idea—a good one, but not one that seemed urgent—until my little academic library had its first real encounter with the dreaded "serials crisis." As Douglas Armato of the University of Minnesota Press remarked dryly at the 2009 annual meeting of the Association of University Presses, it's hard to consider something that has been going on for five decades a "crisis." It's more like a debilitating chronic condition.

At my library we first began to notice the symptoms of chronic serialitis about ten years ago, when some new science faculty members were hired and began to do what they were hired to do: make science research experiences a fundamental part of the undergraduate curriculum.

We realized, as interlibrary-loan requests poured in, that we were no longer able to support our programs. Until that tipping point our small library seemed to be meeting student and faculty needs pretty well by buying materials that were basic to the curriculum and filling gaps with our regional interlibrary loan system. When a copyright fee was called for—a rare occurrence—we billed the department. That clearly wouldn't work any longer. And as we found out as we started to talk to our scientists, it hadn't been working for some time. They simply assumed, because we hadn't been able to add journals in a long time, that we weren't interested in supporting their work.

Never waste a teachable moment
We called in a science librarian from a nearby college as a consultant, who talked with faculty and students, clarified for our administration the need for resources, recommended that we allocate library funds for permissions, and (to his great credit) coaxed the science departments to see this as not just about funding, but about learning. He challenged them to take a far more intentional approach to information literacy, and they embraced that idea.

As a result of his recommendations we added databases, reviewed our serials holdings to make sure they were aligned with changes in the curriculum, and agreed to pay copyright fees for anyone who needed articles that went beyond fair use. Most importantly, we started a conversation that has continued ever since. Sitting down to talk about why we weren't meeting their needs gave us a chance to introduce faculty to the fallout of their choosing to publish in journals owned by commercial conglomerates that assumed copyright, raked in high profit margins, and continually raised subscription prices. We talked about the ripple effect on the whole library collection because it isn't really a "serials" issue—it’s a problem with an insatiable appetite that eats book budgets for breakfast and then rummages through budget lines, looking for its next snack.

Our financial situation hasn't improved since then. We were never able to increase our serials collection as recommended by the consultant, but the conversation has continued, as it must. New science faculty who come along are often used to paying page charges, ponying up hundreds of dollars to purchase a .pdf of an article they wrote, and think it's just how things works, that it's the cost of earning tenure. They aren't taught about open access in graduate school, but they do learn how to thinly-slice their research into as many "least publishable units" as possible. We have to keep making the case with each new crop of faculty.

But many of our faculty have stepped up and contacted their representatives when legislation is on the table supporting open access to federally funded research. They've kept up to date on the issues. They encourage their students to seek out self-archived copies of scientific papers. And they see open access as the future.

No more business as usual
I felt a glimmer of optimism when I sat down last spring to discuss our latest round of cuts. It's a gloomy business, and I was expecting irritation and dismay (and yes, there was some of that). But one member of the science faculty—a man who was hired to teach and do research in an area new to our curriculum, who had to adjust to moving from an R1 institution to one with a library that didn't have a single subscription to a journal in his discipline when he arrived—shrugged, smiled, and said "the open access movement is going to change everything." He's a believer in the common sense of open access, and he has faith it will happen.

We have seen real progress. 100 institutions have passed open access mandates, and Yale students are urging their university to get on the stick. My own library, in a gesture of solidarity pledged as a department to make our research openly accessible last May. The NIH is making publicly funded research available and has set the standard for other federal agencies. (By the way, have you contacted your legislators about supporting FRPAA?) And you know something interesting is going on when Cory Doctorow is featured on the cover of Publisher's Weekly holding up a creative commons license logo. Change is in the wind.

We face an interesting challenge when it come to reengineering libraries to support open access instead of our traditional job of procuring content from corporations. To do this well will require more than a half-hearted attempt at establishing institutional repositories, posting links to a few open access journals on our websites, and talking up open access once a year. It will require a massive organizational and cultural shift to reallocate our resources and our energies to help make this change.

But like the faculty member who spoke up so cheerfully at our latest collection-slashing marathon, I have faith. It's coming. And none too soon.

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books in 2010.

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