Kudos to Cornell, Harvard, Dartmouth, MIT, and the University of
California at Berkeley for initiative the Compact for Open Access
Publishing Equity (COPE). Details can be found here:
http://www.oacompact.org/
COPE is a key initiative in the transition to open access.
Signatories are asked to make a commitment to provide support for open
access publishing that is equitable to the support currently provided
to journals through subscriptions.
One of the reasons COPE is key is simply the recognition that
universities (largely through libraries) are the support system for
scholarly communication. Scholarly publishing is not a
straightforward business transaction where one side produces goods and
the other purchases them. Rather, it is university faculty who do the
research, writing, reviewing, and often the editing, often on time and
in space provided by the universities. Scholarly publishing is a
service, rather than a good.
Once we understand that academic library budgets are the support for
scholarly communication, it is much easier to see that we should be
prioritizing supports that make sense for scholarly communication into
the future, and equity for open access publishing is a great beginning.
Best wishes to COPE. I encourage every library and university to
join. There is no immediate financial commitment required, rather a
commitment to develop models for equity.
Supporting transition to gold OA, in my opinion, in no way diminishes
the importance of green OA. There are good reasons for pursuing both
strategies, both in the short and the long term.
Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com
Received on Fri Sep 18 2009 - 11:36:40 BST