Recently, the University has announced and begun implementing a new open-access policy for faculty publications, in which the University and faculty members reserve the right to republish scholarly articles after submitting them to journals. The Editorial Board applauds the decision, as we believe it will lead to a wider dissemination of important scholarly work, and urges the University to follow through on this plan by establishing a free online journal to facilitate distribution of faculty scholarship.
When faculty members write articles, they are usually published in scholarly journals to which most people have limited access. In fact, subscriptions to some journals may cost thousands of dollars a year. If the faculty member does not reserve the right to republish the article elsewhere then only those with access to the journal can read it. This, of course, seems contradictory to the University’s goal of generating and disseminating knowledge. If our faculty’s insights are available only to the small group of people who can afford journal subscription, the value of those insights is surely limited. Knowledge in a vacuum is not valuable. Only when there is widespread access can an insight be said to have any significance to the community. For these reasons, we are glad that the University is taking steps to expand access to articles that were previously only available in journals.
The next logical step in disseminating this scholarship is for the University to establish a repository where those who are interested can find these articles. After all, it does little good for the University to have the right to publicize journal articles if no one is able to find them in practice. The University appears to be working on this issue at the moment, and we urge them to complete the process as soon as possible.
Finally, some might be worried that the new policy might limit publishing opportunities for the faculty if a certain journal requires the author to give the journal exclusive rights. However, we do not find this fear convincing. First, we must keep in mind that the faculty voted to instate this policy. Faculty members are in the best position to determine if the policy would be detrimental to their publishing prospects. Given that they voted for the policy, we imagine fears are overstated. Moreover, the policy includes the ability to obtain a waiver in cases where the journal demands exclusive rights. As long as this option is used sparingly, and only in those cases where it is absolutely required, we believe the open-access policy can serve its purpose of expanding access while also not limiting publishing prospects.
Overall, we applaud the University’s efforts to expand access to scholarly articles. The true purpose of any institution of higher learning is to generate and disseminate knowledge. The new policy makes it easier for the University to fulfill this purpose. We believe it is well crafted and await implementation of a central repository to make widespread distribution of these important articles possible.
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