David Michael Miller
An online subscription to the Journal of Coordination Chemistry costs more than $12,000 a year. Multiply that by the hundreds of similarly expensive scholarly journals UW-Madison libraries subscribe to, and their budget disappears quite quickly.
UW-Madison Libraries has the second-lowest budget of CIC schools — an academic version of the Big Ten — with a $10.9 million budget in 2013-2014, compared to the University of Michigan libraries’ $23 million budget.
The high cost of accessing scholarly journals can impede ongoing research, says Karl Broman, a professor in UW’s Department of Biostatistics & Medical Informatics.
“From the researchers’ point of view, you can’t proceed without knowing what other people are doing,” he says. “You need access to the latest work by other scientists in the world.”
With massive cuts to the university in Gov. Scott Walker’s biennial budget, UW-Madison Libraries is looking to open access as a way to cut costs and ensure that faculty, students and the public can retrieve the state-of-the-art research the university conducts. Open access makes research available free to anyone via the Internet.
Broman discovered the high cost of scholarly work in the late 1990s.
“When I was a postdoc in ’97-’98, online publications were just starting, and I was surprised to learn that authors were paying to publish their work as well as paying after the fact for a subscription to the journal or buying individual articles outright,” says Broman.
To make sure people have access to research, Broman and the University Library Committee formed a working group to develop an open access policy for UW-Madison. The draft policy aims to give the university the automatic right to freely distribute pre-prints of all published journal articles.
Current UW policy leaves all ownership of scholarly work to faculty, students and staff.
According to Carrie Nelson, a public services and instructional content librarian at College Library, as part of the CIC, researchers can fill out an author addendum that allows faculty to publish articles into open access repositories. While the addendum is available online through UW-Madison Libraries, researchers must take the initiative to fill it out and give it to the publisher prior to signing the contract. Without the addendum, publishing companies control the rights — and access — to the research.
A system-wide open access policy would automatically let the university assert rights over faculty work, instead of making faculty fill out an addendum. Even with the policy in place, they would be able to opt out if a publishing company refused to publish their work.
For Broman and Nelson, the biggest barriers to getting the policy adopted is convincing faculty that it won’t hinder their ability to get tenure and that open access does not equate to low quality.
“I think that some faculty would say, ‘Open access, that must be junk,’” says Nelson. “And to a certain extent, if you want to get tenure, you want to publish in high-profile journals.”
But Broman says the perception that open access is junk is faulty.
“There are quite well respected open access journals,” says Broman. “They’re not Science and Nature, but they’re very good.”
The state created new wrinkles for faculty when it eliminated both tenure and shared governance in its most recent budget. UW’s Board of Regents the UW System’s 18-member governing body — is set to come up with new policies regarding both.
Broman is more concerned about changes to shared governance, a previously protected policy in state statute that gave staff, faculty and students a voice in decisions concerning the operation of the university.
Until the effects of the budget shake out, Broman hopes to raise awareness of the issue of open access.
“I think more faculty will understand what their rights are and what they’re giving away by signing certain copyright releases.”
