Media Relations
News Releases
For Release Upon Receipt - February 17, 2009
Contact:
Colin Riley, 617-353-2240, criley@bu.edu
BOSTON UNIVERSITY ENDORSES INSTITUTION-WIDE, OPEN-ACCESS RESEARCH ARCHIVE
Trend-setting policy allows voluntary online dissemination of scholarly work
(Boston) – Research by Boston University faculty and staff will soon be freely available in an online archive, bypassing the conventional and restrictive route of publishing papers in academic journals, announced BU President Robert A. Brown.
Although the online publishing alternative is voluntary, its unprecedented university-wide endorsement by all of BU’s 17 schools and colleges – the result of a jointly passed resolution by the faculty and the administration -- breaks new ground among U.S. institutions of higher education.
“The resolution passed by the Faculty and University Councils is a very important statement by the entire BU community on the importance of open access to the results of scholarship and research created within the institution,” said Brown. “The digital archive will become a great repository for the creativity of our faculty and students.”
The online archive will allow anyone to view BU’s scholarly work, previously only available to journal subscribers, as long as the authors are credited and the scholarship isn’t used for profit. Since journals typically own the exclusive copyright, they often control access to intellectual property, restricting academics and clinicians from distributing it freely to colleagues and students.
Wendy Mariner, chair of the Faculty Council and a professor at BU’s School of Law, the School of Medicine and the School of Public Health, stated: “We believe this is the first time that a university as a whole has taken a stand on behalf of the institution as opposed to a single school or college. We are looking forward to new forms of publication in the 21st century that will transform the ways that knowledge and information are shared.”
Mariner added that the resolution proposes that faculty who participate will retain the rights to their own research.
The increased ownership and control is good news for researchers such as Barbara Millen, professor and chair of the graduate Nutrition Program at BU’s School of Medicine. While working on a book about nutrition research, Millen found herself in the paradoxical position of needing permission to use her own tables and figures after they were published in a journal that retained the copyright to her work. The challenge, said Millen, who co-chaired the University Council committee that recommended BU’s open access initiative, will be providing faculty with the tools to make their research available online.
“Open access will really highlight the tremendous productivity of our faculty,” Millen said. “Among the more important things to make it work is collaboration between the libraries and our faculty to get their research onto the Web. It’s not an inconsequential task.”
Some universities, such as the University of California, are covering the cost for their faculty for open-access publishing fees, and in other cases, researchers have included these fees as a line item in their grant applications. At least one major source of grants, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recently mandated that any research it funds must be open-access within a year after publication.
Last year, according to an editorial in Environmental Health, just 10 percent of published scientific articles are accessible without restrictions. But a 2006 survey by the Washington, D.C.-based Association of Research Libraries found that 43 percent of its member universities and research institutions already had open-access archives and 35 percent were planning one.
“Open access is an irresistible tide,” said David Ozonoff, a professor of environmental health at BU’s School of Public Health. “The publishers see this. They’ve been trying to prevent it, but it’s impossible.”
News of the University Council’s vote was welcomed by Robert Hudson, director of BU’s Mugar Memorial Library, and as co-chair of the University Council on scholarly activities and libraries, a key force behind the move toward open access. Hudson says the effort to maintain an up-to-date collection of scholarly journals costs approximately $8 million per year. Annual subscription rates can reach $20,000, and tend to increase six to 10 percent each year, making the expansion of the library’s scholarly archive a financial challenge.
“This vote sends a very strong message of support for open and free exchange of scholarly work,” said Hudson. “It really has increased the potential to showcase the research and scholarship of the university in ways that have not been evident.”
— 30 —
