A few months ago, the mayor of San Francisco met some of the city’s leading technology entrepreneurs. On the surface, it looked like little more than a photo opportunity – a chance for the smooth and ambitious mayor, Gavin Newsom, to smile and glad-hand with Twitter and a string of other hot internet companies. But signs soon emerged that something more fundamental was taking place.

Public access to research is “inevitable,” but it will be a slog to get to it. That was the takeaway message of a panel on the role libraries can play in supporting current and future public-access moves. The panel was part of the program at the membership meeting of the Association of Research Libraries, held here yesterday and today.

“Who pays for Open Access?” is a key question faced by publishers, authors, and libraries as awareness and interest in free, immediate, online access to scholarly research increases. SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) examines the issue of sustainability for current and prospective open-access publishers in a timely new guide, “Income models for Open Access: An overview of current practice,” by Raym Crow.

. . . The open letter, spearheaded by library directors and signed by a subset of the 80 selective institutions that make up the Oberlin Group consortium, begins with an axiom of public access support: “Academic libraries simply cannot afford ready access to most of the research literature that their faculty and students need.”

The letter outlines the benefits the similar NIH mandate has afforded liberal arts colleges, and argues that the even more expansive FRPAA bill would further “democratize access to research information funded by tax dollars.”

S. 1373

In a move to encourage researchers to make their work open to the public, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Calgary established funds that faculty and graduate students could use cover publication charges for open-access journals. Berkeley and Calgary are two of several funds established in recent years, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Wisconsin – Madison, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, the University of Oregon, and other sites in the U.K.

After a year of implementation in Calgary and Berkeley, librarians at these universities are reviewing their efforts and are pleased to report on the results.

In an effort to support alternatives to traditional scholarly publishing, five major research universities announced their joint commitment to open-access journals on Monday.

The institutions—Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley—signed a compact agreeing to the “timely establishment” of mechanisms for providing financial support for free open-access journals.

On June 25, Senators John Cornyn and Joe Lieberman re-introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA, S.1373) in the Senate.
This is an important development. FRPAA would essentially extend the NIH open-access policy across the federal government. Most federally-funded researchers would be required to deposit their peer reviewed manuscripts in a suitable open access repository at the time of acceptance for publication, and the repositories would be required to release the open access copies no later than six months after publication.

The debate over Open Access (OA) has typically been the domain of faculty and administrations, taking place near the pinnacle of academia’s ivory tower. But last week the American Medical Student Association and other student groups, brokered by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), weighed in from below with their own “Student Statement on the Right to Research.”
In the statement, students call upon faculty, researchers, and funding groups (including governments) to support Open Access principles in order to remove “barriers for scholarly and educational re-use” of research materials.

New mandates requiring researchers to make their papers available in open access have been announced in Belgium, Norway, and the UK
A trend in 2009 has been the accelerated progress in institutions, funders, and governments adopting mandates that require researchers to make copies of their papers available in open access (’green’ open access).
Details of all existing mandates can be found at ROARMAP.

Publicly funded research doesn’t seem so public when the public has to pay to read the results in a journal. A proposed law would help publishing companies preserve their business models, but it would limit public access to the research. Janet Babin reports.