This transcript of the CU at the Libraries episode “Open Access At CU Boulder” has been rewritten for the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries news site. Press play to listen to this episode below or find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Introduction:
I want you to imagine a clear, plexiglass cube. It looks like a giant donation box, It’s about 5 by 8 feet, to give you a sense of scale. You can put money in, but once you do, you can’t get it back out.
Because it contains 10 million dollars cash … approximately how much the CU Boulder Libraries spend on subscription access to scholarly research every year. And every year, providing basic access to research and learning materials gets more and more expensive. How much bigger can we let this giant box get before something has to give?
Hi, I’m Melissa Cantrell, and I’m the scholarly communication librarian here at CU Boulder. And I fight for more equitable and sustainable access to research. That’s where Open Access comes into play.
Open Access is a movement to create better visibility and impact for researchers, as well as a more equitable landscape for the authors and readers of scholarly literature globally.
Imagine if we were able to take that money in the box and give everyone in the world permanent, free access to our research?
This week on CU at the Libraries, we’re looking at what the university is doing to champion this movement.
Through a series of interviews, we’ll explore the history of open access and learn about how the Libraries got involved. Then we’ll talk to a CU graduate student and professor about the ways open access has helped them and share small ways that you can get involved.
Part 1: Interviewing The Librarian
MC: “To learn more about the history of Open Access on campus, I sat down with Andrew Johnson. He heads data and scholarly communication services at the Libraries. He agreed to meet me at the Laughing Goat, a local coffee shop on the first floor of Norlin Library.
“Andrew, I was wondering if, just for context, you could provide background information for our listeners about the landscape of journal publishing, maybe nationally over the past 10 to 20 years. And how did open access emerge as a new model for scholarly publishing.”
AJ: “I think I would even take it back a little bit farther than 20 years. The 1990s is where I would start and academic journal publishing was no different then. Prior to that, journals looked like print magazines, essentially. In order to produce and disseminate those journals, you needed a printing press and you needed distribution mechanisms. Subscription models made a lot of sense and it also made a lot of sense for academics to sign over their copyrights to journal publishers to allow them to do all those things more easily.
“Well, once everything started going online, some of those models started to break down a little bit. Basically, every academic journal publisher has a monopoly on their content, where you can only publish your journal article with one and only one publisher. Publishers realized this when content was going online and the more concrete market forces of a print world and a subscription-based world started to change—some publishers, at least—realized that they could start increasing prices with sort of no limit to how much they would charge because authors would still need to publish with them. Libraries would still need to subscribe for access.
“This is a very similar world to movies or music or newspapers going online, where you started to see expectations that all the content online would be free. For instance, The New York Times charges a subscription to access content online. The most similar experience for the everyday person would be to come up against one of these paywalls where they try to access an article and it says no, you have to be a subscriber to get this. This is the same situation with journals. If you're not affiliated with an institution that can afford to subscribe to these journals and you try to access it—or even if you are and you try to access it off-campus, you might come up against one of these paywalls.
“The big difference is everybody who works for a newspaper or as a musician or an artist of some sort that produces this content is doing it as their job and getting paid to do that and being expected to be paid for it. Whereas with the journal publishing model, authors are doing it for free. They're doing it to get credit for tenure and promotion, primarily. They're also peer reviewing for free and in many cases they're editing for free and there's absolutely no expectation whatsoever of being paid monetarily for this work. So that gives the journals this enormous ability to make massive profits off this situation.
“This movement called Open Access started to develop as a reaction to that. If scholars are producing all this knowledge with their salaries being paid by their institutions and with grant funding coming from public sources like federal funding agencies, then the results of that research, primarily the journal articles, should be available to the public to read and access for free.”
MC: “Andrew, I've been here at the Libraries for a couple of years, but you've been here since 2011. Can you tell me a little bit about the history of open access at CU Boulder?”
AJ: “There were pockets of students and faculty who were really interested in open access, and librarians who had been doing some kind of outreach around it as well. So, when I got here, one of the first things that I was able to do was kind of formalize some of the library's efforts and get basically a committee together to put on our first open access week slate of events, and to really start coordinating our strategy within the Libraries about how we were going to support open access on campus. That led to several years of really successful Open Access Week programming, including talks from people such as Nobel Prize Winner and Distinguished Professor Tom Cech.
“Around the same time, we also started talking very seriously with the United Government of Graduate Students (UGGS) on campus, who at that point was really kind of the most passionate group about open access issues and wanted to get more involved and kind of make a difference on campus. We started working with them and through their connections, the Boulder Faculty Assembly (BFA), which is kind of the faculty senate on campus, we worked with them to get a campus-wide open access policy in place for all faculty at CU Boulder.
“Through several years of meetings, spearheaded by the graduate students in conjunction with librarians and then through various BFA committees, we were able to get that passed. It was formally adopted by the campus in 2015.”
MC: “How do you think that the library services around open access have helped to build support and champions around open access across campus?”
AJ: “The overall support has grown quite a bit, but certainly people are still dealing with rights issues. That's a lot of what the campus Open Access Policy was designed to address by helping to set a baseline across campus for all faculty so that they know they can provide open access to a particular version of every single article they write while they're at CU Boulder and not the author's final manuscript right before it goes to the publisher and gets all of their branding and typesetting on it. How to pay for this stuff is the other big, big challenge, and we've partially addressed that with our Open Access Fund, which helps individual authors pay for article processing charges for open access articles. We're engaging in larger conversations about the economic models going forward.
Part 2: Interviewing The Graduate Student
MC: “I appreciated that Andrew touched on the fact that CU Boulder graduate students have a history of advocacy for open access rights. So I thought it was important to connect with a graduate student engaging with open access publishing to get more context. I caught up with Jesse Niebaum on the quad outside Norlin Library over the summer. At the time, he was a PH.D. student in the department of psychology and neuroscience. His research is focused on how children’s brains develop in terms of cognitive controls such as focus and behavior.
“Can you tell me about how you got interested in open access and what your experience with it has been like thus far?”
JN: “Like many people entering the world of academic publishing, I was really surprised and I would say even startled the business model. The way this typically works is researchers are funded by either the public or the institution or some state agency or some federal agency like the National Science Foundation, or even some private organization to do a particular research project or a particular study. Then when that is done they send that research off to a private company and pay to do so. That private company then typically has a quality control process that involves volunteer labor from experts at the university, and then also charges the university or an individual to access that research. So basically the public is paying for research at every step of the process.
“From an ethical standpoint, it just seems very necessary for all of this publicly funded research to be available to the public without either being charged a second time by a private company or even struggling to find out how or where to access the research that, at least from my perspective, they should already own because they funded it at the front end.
“Another advantage of open access is that the pace of research can be faster. So a lot of times there's some embargo on a research product or you're not allowed to post it on your personal website or some repository for some period of time. I think if you believe that the research you're doing is important or the research you're doing is for the public good, then you should allow the public to be able to consume that research as quickly as possible or want other researchers to critique or build on your findings as quickly as possible. Open access is an important way to accelerate the progress of science as well.
“I’ve really found that just explaining to people how the academic publishing industry works does a lot to really open their eyes about the changes that need to be made in the system and the benefits that open access can bring to that.”
MC: “That's a really good point. I was wondering if you could talk about any ways that open access has helped you in your time here at CU Boulder?”
JN: “I have really started to utilize other tools to at least make sure that my research can be accessible to other researchers or to the public as quickly as possible. For example, in my department there is a really big push for utilizing this tool called the Open Science Framework and that was developed at the University of Virginia. It's basically a hosting platform for you to put your study plans or your study materials or your data onto a server that anyone can access.
“Another interesting tool that I have recently utilized are preprint servers. These are places where you can post a research product or a paper before it gets published. So the public can consume it or critique it long before the official peer review and publication process, which can take several weeks, several months, or several years. This way, the research product is always up there, always accessible, speeds up science and improves your paper so you can get that critical feedback before you send it to a journal.”
MC: “I really appreciate how you brought up the fact that open access can not only help people bring their research to the public but it also helps to solicit feedback and really bring more people into the conversation about research. I was wondering if there are any ways that you think that the university can improve support for open access for researchers on campus?”
JN: “Honestly, I would say that CU Boulder especially is doing a great job in terms of supporting open access. I know over my time here I've talked to several people in the CU Boulder Libraries who seem very knowledgeable about the topic itself and have been able to provide feedback about outlets to better get research out there. I've also been very grateful for the Open Access Research Fund that is available for researchers publishing to an open access journal.
“Public universities, especially these large state universities, have a lot of leverage to start working with these private companies, these large academic publishers, to try to at least decrease the costs of academic publishing or to completely regain control of the research that's done at their own universities or at other public institutions. Seeing that kind of coordination among the state universities here in Colorado or even working with other large state university systems, I think it will be increasingly important as universities and academic researchers regain control over the research products that they put out there.”
Part 3: Interviewing The Professor
MC: “Now I'm with Professor Shelly Miller in the Engineering Center. Shelly is a professor of mechanical engineering at CU Boulder. So Shelly, can you tell me a little bit about what you do and how long you've been here?”
SM: “I have been here over 20 years. I joined the faculty in 1998 and I'm an urban air pollution researcher and teacher. I really focus on what air pollution you might be exposed to in the urban environment, both outdoors and indoors.”
MC: “Can you tell me a story about where your interest and open access came from and how that interest developed over time?”
SM: “Honestly, one of my colleagues who also introduced me to Twitter, he said, ‘You really should be on Twitter because you learn a lot and you network a lot and it's a great way to do science.’ After a couple years, I realized he is accurate and that I really do meet a lot of interesting people and learn a lot on Twitter. You can click on a link and go right to a journal article and if it's not open access you can't get very far. This colleague who introduced me to Twitter has also been ranting about publishing open access and why it's so important. So I realized just how important it is for me personally to get my research out into the public domain because it really impacts people right where they are today. For instance, today is a high ozone day. It would be nice to know why. But if I keep it not open access then it's more difficult for them to figure out what the science says.”
MC: “Yeah, I mean, I think it's really important to bring science and research to the public and make it more of an open forum for people to have important conversations around the research that's being done. I think open access really helps to bring that to the forefront in terms of making it possible for research and science to advance a faster rate. So it's really exciting to see that you're actually living that.”
SM: “I also wanted to share with you a really positive experience I had with open access. I had been publishing in this open access journal for quite a while and they asked me to do a special edition and be an editor of papers on indoor air pollution. I agreed and it was a fantastic experience! I supported so many papers from the beginning to the end with authors that were from all different parts of the world. Papers from Portugal, papers from Africa, papers from Japan … and what it made me realize is that we can gain access to high-quality research from scientists from all over the world through this open access platform where as they may not have had this kind of opportunity through the standard type of publications and I've felt really proud of that.”
MC: “That's really interesting! How do you think the campus could provide more support for researchers to engage in open access?”
SM: “I think that so far, the effort has been pretty reasonable. I am incredibly appreciative of the Open Access Fund, where researchers can apply to get their papers published if they didn't include money in their research grants to publish or if they don't have the money. I've utilized that and I'm sure we need more money in that fund.
“I think it's really important to have grassroots efforts so that researchers can talk to other researchers about why it's important. I know that you'll tend to do something if you know somebody else is doing it. So efforts to get the word out I think is really key and just more of that is what we need. I know that there is some work to do with the major publishing companies to push back on their models of publishing research articles and I really admire the university for pursuing that difficult path.”
MC: “Even though I've been here at CU Boulder for only two years, I've really seen the move towards open access grow to greater heights with a lot more support behind it. I also think that it's good to always try and find new ways that we can try to advance it and reach more people about open access. Shelley, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate you taking the time and I really appreciate all of your support on campus for open access publishing.”
To learn more about open access, consider the University Libraries full schedule of events in celebration of International Open Access Week 2019, Oct. 21 - Oct. 25.