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Short-term Pain May Be Worth Long-term Gain
Marcie Granahan,
NFAIS Executive Director
The University of California (UC) continues to garner faculty support of its decision to end the university's subscription contract with Elsevier in favor of upholding its mission to provide universal open access to all UC research. Ten percent of U.S. publishing output comes from scholars at UC's 10 campuses, and nearly 20 percent of the 50,000 articles published last year by UC scholars appear in Elsevier's 3,000 journals [see full article here]. While an inconvenience to some departments, particularly the medical school, many are warming up to the notion that UC is playing a major role in changing the scholarly publishing ecosystem.
UC's immediate goal is not the elimination of scholarly journals but to find ways around the traditional for-profit journal model, and to advance the shift from hybrid to open access arrangements [see full article here]. To ease researcher concerns, the university is actively publicizing alternative means to access Elsevier articles [see full article here], including searching for open access copies through PubMed or Google, installing plug-in browsers such as Unpaywall, networking platforms like ResearchGate, interlibrary loans, and utilizing preprint sites like arXiv.org. While biologists were not initially on board with arXiv at its inception, participation has taken off in the last four to five years and, without which, the ability to forego access to a major subscription publisher would not have been possible—a phenomenon some have coined as "leakage" [see full article here].
UC is not alone in its crusade, and Norway recently cancelled its contracts with Elsevier when they were unable to strike a more favorable "read and publish" deal [see full article here]. And, while some view "read and publish" as a stop-gap measure to move scholarly publishing in the direction of an exclusively open-access model, others warn it will only lock in resources to traditional publishers and make the transition to universal open access even harder.
The UC boycott has received significant support from the machine-learning community, which sees the shift to open access as an opportunity [see full article here]. The application of AI and text-mining to scientific literature would allow researchers to draw conclusions from disparate and seemingly unconnected research and could potentially lead to greater scientific discovery. Open-access articles can be more readily obtained, analyzed and curated.
Driven by these advancing technologies, scholarly publication may soon more closely resemble the current state of the music industry than of traditional journal models, where decentralized content—or syndicated content—is shared through cross-publisher platforms [see full article here]. Cambridge University Press, Thieme, and Springer Nature have partnered with ResearchGate on a pilot program to syndicate content, providing access to full-text scientific articles [see full article here].
While the road ahead may be a difficult one for UC faculty and researchers, the short-term pain may well be worth the long-term gain.
Past insights and reflections on industry developments written by NFAIS Executive Director Marcie Granahan are now archived in NFAIS Community Forum. Feel free to post your comments about these and other key topics there.
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