A Message from the Vice President -- Param Bedi
GREETINGS FROM THE BERTRAND LIBRARY!
Open Access at Bucknell University
At the October 4, 2011 faculty meeting, Bucknell faculty adopted an Open Access policy for disseminating their scholarly articles. This vote was significant not only for faculty making their scholarship available to the world, but it also signified how our faculty see what happens at Bucknell in a global context. Open Access is an important element of scholarly communications, and I am very pleased that a liberal arts institution like Bucknell is taking the lead on this worldwide initiative.
What is Bucknell's Open Access policy?
The faculty of Bucknell University grant to Bucknell University limited use of their scholarly articles for the purpose of making these articles open access. Specifically, each faculty member grants Bucknell University a nonexclusive, paid-up, worldwide license for each of his or her scholarly articles for the purpose of making these articles openly accessible in an institutional repository, and grants Bucknell University permission to exercise all rights under copyright for this purpose, as well as to authorize other parties to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for income or profit. A scholarly article is defined as a peer-reviewed scholarly work published in a journal or in another format that a faculty member determines to be appropriate for his or her particular discipline.
What is the rationale for supporting open access?
There are three main arguments in support of open access:
● Ethics: Research is a public good, often financed directly or indirectly by public funds, and should therefore be made available to the public. Open access also helps enable access to materials for scholars in developing countries, and helps put rich and poor students and universities on more equal ground. For this reason, open access is a form of social justice, allowing anyone to access research regardless of their own or their institution's ability to pay subscription fees.
● Research Impact: Research shows that open access publications tend to be distributed more widely and cited more often than their non-open-access counterparts. With more than 24,000 journals currently in print, no library can have every journal in its collection, meaning that all non-open-access articles miss some of their potential audience.
● Economics: Coupled with relatively flat library budgets, the increasing cost and number of academic journals have made maintaining collection levels unsustainable. Many libraries have had no choice but to cancel journal subscriptions and reduce expenditures in other areas (such as book collections).
In a study conducted by Library and Information Technology on faculty publications in 2010, we found that almost a fifth of peer-reviewed articles published by Bucknell faculty were not available to our own students and faculty. Bucknell's open access policy will not only make those articles available to Bucknell students and faculty, but to anyone in the world. It feels great to be part of an institution that is making a difference worldwide, one scholarly article at a time!
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