Happy Open Access Week!

The University of Virginia Claude Moore Health Sciences Library spends around two million dollars a year--80% of its collections budget--on journal subscriptions.  That’s the equivalent of placing one-dollar bills, end-to-end, from Charlottesville to Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  Those 185 miles of one dollar bills are paid to a group of publishers, who provide the University of Virginia access to their journal content.  

Before online journals, subscription costs were used by publishers primarily to cover the costs of printing and distributing their journals.  Today, however, most academic health sciences libraries subscribe to very few print journals, due to online availability, which might lead to the assumption that subscription costs would be lower due to the decrease in publishing and distribution costs.  That assumption would be wrong.  Annual subscription costs continue to steadily rise long after publishers have transitioned from print to electronic.  This model of publishing is not sustainable.  At some point, academic health sciences library budgets will not be able to accommodate the rising subscription costs.  
 

What is Open Access?

Fortunately, there are alternative models of publishing.  Open access (OA), for example, offers a more sustainable, egalitarian, publishing model.  Academic institutions can support OA by establishing an institutional repository, encouraging authors to publish in OA journals, and creating university open access publishing solutions.  At UVA, Libra is the institutional repository, and Aperio is a newly created open access publishing solution.  

A caveat to publishing in an OA journal is that the author usually has to cover publishing charges, which is called the article processing charge (APC).  Authors can defray APC costs by adding publishing costs to a grant  proposal or by seeking funding through institutional means.  APCs generally range between $2,000 and $3,000.

The more that University of Virginia authors publish in OA models, the more that research is free and open to the world.  With fewer dollars going to subscriptions, the Health Sciences Library would be able to enhance our research tools and services.
 

What is Open Access Week?

OA is celebrated every year during the fourth week in October.  International Open Access Week  provides an opportunity to promote OA through raising visibility and sponsoring events.  Please attend this workshop discussion on author’s rights.  It will take place in Brown Science & Engineering Library on October 22nd from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM:

Author's Rights: Use the Law, Share Your Work, Change the World
In this workshop discussion you’ll learn about the basic rights that copyright gives to authors, how those rights are typically treated in publication agreements, and opportunities and strategies for using your rights to promote a more sustainable scholarly ecosystem. We will discuss concrete advice for navigating the publishing world as we find it, along with more abstract questions about the future of sharing scholarship. Bring your questions, concerns, and even your own troublesome publishing agreements.

For additional information, please contact Dan Wilson, Associate Director for Collections & Library Services: danwilson@virginia.edu.