Open Social Scholarship Annotated Bibliography/Open Access

Category Overview
The open access movement has infiltrated many aspects of today’s world and has been increasingly advocated for in academic settings, often under the banner that access to knowledge is a human right, and that knowledge should be openly available rather than hidden behind paywalls. The objective of this category is to present critical publications that focus on the accessibility of information, primarily scholarly research. Authors approach open access from two different vantage points: either by focusing on open access as a theory or as a fundamental human right (Anderson 1998; Suber 2004), or treating open access as a practical problem and offering suggestions on how to successfully implement its principles in a capitalist society (Asmah 2014; Ayris et al. 2014; Kingsley 2013). Several articles explore the perception of open access publishing in order to establish why scholars might shy away from sharing their research in this type of venue (Cohen 2010; Coonin and Younce 2009; Gaines 2015; Rodriguez 2014). Overall, these studies found that despite the community’s agreement to and understanding of the benefits of open access publishing, free information is seen as less prestigious and therefore less valuable when it comes to academic promotions and tenure. The majority of publications discuss the roles of scholars and libraries in the open access movement, but some also touch on the importance of policy-makers and the larger community in advocating for change.

Annotations
** Adema, Janneke. 2014. “Overview of Open Access Models for eBooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” OAPEN Project Report. https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/file/a976330e-ed7a-4bd5-b0ed-47cab90e9a5e/1/ademaoapen2comb.pdf.
 * Adema provides an overview of current open access publishing models being experimented with by organizations and institutions in the humanities and social sciences. The author intends to find strategies for making open access book publishing a sustainable enterprise, with funding and profit for all parties involved. Adema explores a variety of business models and publishing processes that make up what she terms the experimental phase of open access book publishing. She touches on the motives—both monetary and missionary—behind the open access movement, compares various presses and press partnerships, and explores the different practices and collaborations that make open access sustainable.

Anderson, Charles. 1998. “Universal Access—Free and Open Access—It Depends…” Reference & User Services Quarterly 38 (1): 25–27.
 * Anderson provides a brief editorial introduction to the tradition of open access values, arguing that the values of open access are anything but new. He asserts that the entire public library movement was founded on the ideas of open access, and asks how much progress has been made since then. For Anderson, it is necessary that attitudes around open access change in order to stimulate progress. It is not enough to simply provide a workstation or to secure resources; the individuals working in the institutions have to believe in the importance of open access principles.

Asmah, Josephine. 2014. “International Policy and Practice on Open Access for Monographs.” Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. http://www.ideas-idees.ca/sites/default/files/aspp-oa-appendix.pdf.
 * Asmah presents an overview of international open access policies and practices. The objective of this report is to inform the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences to what extent international government policies address open access, especially in terms of open access monographs. Asmah begins with a history of the open access movement and a summary of the importance of open access ideologies. She conducts a survey of open access policies across global markets and gives a brief but detailed summary on how various countries handle open access issues (including Austria, the United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, France, the United States, Japan, and South Africa). These countries were chosen specifically to represent the organizations that Asmah considers to be the major global open access players. She concludes by suggesting a position for Canada in the open access movement.

Ayris, Paul, Erica McLaren, Martin Moyle, Catherine Sharp, and Lara Speicher. 2014. “Open Access in UCL: A New Paradigm for London’s Global University in Research Support.” Australian Academic & Research Libraries 45 (4): 282–95.
 * Ayris, McLaren, Moyle, Sharp, and Speicher address the benefits and challenges of open access publishing for a research university. While open access publishing provides an unprecedented opportunity for scholars to disseminate their research globally, it also presents numerous barriers for institutions, such as funding start-up costs, balancing roles, and measuring success. The authors provide insight on how to overcome these challenges from their positions as employees of the University College London (UCL). Ayris et al. argue that the popular discourse that discourages open access, or presents it in a negative light, is often factually incorrect. They provide evidence that free publications from UCL are widely disseminated, financially viable, and of outstanding quality. The authors assert that open access is an opportunity, not a threat, to research universities. By developing open access policies, constructing open access repositories, and establishing a gold standard open access press, universities can reap the rewards of open access publishing.

Bailey, Charles. 2007. “Open Access and Libraries.” Collection Management 32 (3-4): 351–83.
 * Bailey examines the major components of the open access movement. He analyzes the validity of open access strategies, discusses the rationale behind the open access movement, addresses the movement’s impact on libraries, and considers whether and how open access policies will transform jobs. Bailey takes up several open access case studies, including the Berlin Declaration, as a means of describing the field. He defines open access as freely available, online literature that is royalty free and can be used with minimal restrictions. While Bailey acknowledges that the open access movement is only one of many potential solutions to the serious problems libraries face when it comes to scholarly communication and research support, he argues that it is a very important one and that the voices of libraries need to be more prominent in the debate. If libraries were to embrace open access to a greater degree, Bailey believes that graduate students could be involved in creating new, valuable, and authoritative digital resources.

Björk, Bo-Christer. 2004. “Open Access to Scientific Publications – an Analysis of the Barriers to Change?” Information Research 9 (2): n.p.
 * Björk asserts that the rise of the Internet has changed how information is disseminated. While the methods may have changed, the economic ramifications of scholarly publishing have stayed the same. This has created a need to rethink the current publishing system. Björk proposes an open access system and defines open access as the means to information that can be read and shared for noncommercial purposes without any payments or restrictions. He also acknowledges, however, that systems are difficult to change; legal barriers, a lack of infrastructure, and the need to develop a new business model stand in the way. Björk argues that, while most people recognize the need for an open access system, it will take more than simple awareness for the system to be put into action.

Bohannon, John. 2013. “Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?” Science 342: 60–5.
 * Bohannon details an experiment where a spoof paper was submitted to a myriad of open access journals and uses the results of this experience as evidence for the lack of thorough, robust peer review. Bohannon submitted this spoof paper, using a fake name and institution, to relevant online journals. The spoof paper was designed to be mundane with obvious flaws in its methodology. At the time of publication, Bohannon had submitted the paper to 304 journals. More than half of the journals (157) accepted the paper, 98 journals rejected the paper, and the remaining 49 journals had not responded. Only 36 of the submission generated any type of review comments that recognized the fatal flaws in the experiments methodology; ultimately, 16 of those papers were still accepted despite the poor reviews. Bohannon closes the article by suggesting that open access journals might not be to blame for these deficiencies and that the same result may have been produced if conducted with subscription journals.

Canadian Association of Research Libraries. n.d. “Open Access.” http://www.carl-abrc.ca/advancing-research/scholarly-communication/open-access/.
 * The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) advocates for open access because of the benefits it grants users, primarily open access to reading and utilizing knowledge. This mode of dissemination benefits funding agencies, since their investment has a maximized return, as well as the researchers, since their scholarship is distributed to a wider audience. CARL aligns its principles with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) Declaration and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. From BOAI, CARL adopts and propagates the practice of publishing scholarly literature in open access. It also follows the Berlin Declaration in its decision to publish all original scientific research results and related data and metadata in open access. Thus, CARL’s vision applies to the output of the scholarly work they fund, with a criteria that emphasizes that copyright is met, and that the product is consistent with highest peer review standards. CARL continues to work to implement open access standards and deal with the challenges that arise with this type of knowledge dissemination.

Chan, Leslie. 2004. “Supporting and Enhancing Scholarship in the Digital Age.” Canadian Journal of Communication 29 (3): 277–300.
 * Chan argues that the key goal of open access is to maximize the impact of research by reaching the largest number of readers possible. This impact can be measured by counting citation references connected to specific articles. Chan summarizes a study conducted by the Institute of Scientific Information that found, when studying 190 journals, that those with open access and those with proprietary access showed no difference in impact. However, Chan argues that this data is invalid because it took up the journal itself, not the individual article, as its unit of measurement. Conducting her own research, Chan finds that there was, in fact, an impact factor difference of 300% in favour of open access articles. For Chan, knowledge is a public good and must be distributed as openly as possible.

Chang, Yu-Wei. 2015. “Librarians’ Contribution to Open Access Journal Publishing in Library and Information Science From the Perspective of Authorship.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 41 (5): 660–68.
 * Chang examines how librarian authors participate in open access publishing. In particular, the author studies librarians who contribute articles to journals in the field of library and information science. Chang’s case study took up 19 open access library and information science journals in which 1,819 articles were published between 2008 and 2013. Of the 1,819 articles, 55.6% of the authors were librarians (the next highest category was scholars at 33.5%), and 53.7% of the articles were co-authored or collaborative. The majority of these partnerships were librarian-librarian collaborations, but librarian-scholar co-authorships ranked second highest. Overall, the results demonstrate that open access publishing offers an opportunity for librarians to move from the more typical research support role into more of a knowledge creation role. Chang concludes that more authors need to publish on open access platforms in order for them to survive.

** Cohen, Daniel J. 2010. “Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values.” May 27, 2010. https://dancohen.org. /2010/05/27/open-access-publishing-and-scholarly-values/.
 * Cohen builds on the notions of the supply and demand side of scholarly communication, as well as the value system of scholars, in order make a case for increasing open access scholarship and being more receptive to scholarship that does not adhere to the traditional publishing system. According to Cohen, the four sentiments that stand in the way of embracing open access scholarship are impartiality, passion, shame, and narcissism. Cohen uses impartiality in relation to the pressure scholars feel to publish in traditional venues for a number for reasons, including legitimate concerns such as career growth. He argues that open access publishing can take place in parallel to more traditional forms of publishing. Cohen also criticizes the commercial apparatus of the publishing system that takes advantage of scholars and their labour and passion, which is expressed in writing. He argues for the need to reorient the ways in which scholarship is produced and published in order to increase access, and also to break the chain within a system that is exploiting academics. Cohen argues that the act of accepting certain digital medium aspects and rejecting others is a “shameful hypocrisy” (n.p.). The examples he provides are using the digital medium as the primary source for research yet avoiding it as a means of publishing and talking about access and the need for academics to be more inclusive, but avoiding the existing necessary steps towards implementing these notions into practice. Finally, the narcissistic factor is related to the reputability of publishing in traditional venues; Cohen counters this by saying that open access publishing is likely to get better readership and to spread ideas more widely, and could also be added to the CV. The author concludes by inviting us to envision and enact a more straightforward and virtuous model for scholarly communication.

Coonin, Bryna, and Leigh Younce. 2009. “Publishing in Open Access Journals in The Social Sciences and Humanities: Who’s Doing It and Why.” ACRL Fourteenth National Conference. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/national/seattle/papers/85.pdf.
 * Coonin and Younce survey 918 authors who published in open access humanities and social science journals in 2007 and 2008 in order to study the demographics and perceptions of open access. A total of 339 individuals responded to the survey. The respondents ranked peer review as the most important factor in choosing a journal, with reputation and suitability ranking second and third. The authors that published the most over the calendar year also published the most articles in open access journals. Approximately 15% of the respondents were unaware of open access publishing, and more than 50% saw open access journals as having less prestige. Further, Author Processing Charges (APCs) often obstruct publication, as authors or their institutions are sometimes expected to levy fees to publish in open access journals, and these costs discourage many from seeking this type of publication venue. Overall, Coonin and Younce observe that the humanities and social sciences have been slower at integrating open access publishing than the scientific disciplines.

** Eve, Martin Paul. 2015. “Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Communication in Non-Scientific Disciplines.” Online Information Review 39 (5): 717–32.
 * Eve presents an overview of the current open access debate in non-scientific (STEM) disciplines. Eve argues that non-STEM disciplines have consistently lagged behind in their approach to open access policies and practices. He attributes this gap to a variety of economic and cultural factors, and argues that these specific challenges or objections have stunted the discipline’s growth of open access in these disciplines. Eve suggests that his article is far too short and biased to do justice to the complexity of the issues he raises; however, it is his hope that the insights therein spur action and critical appraisal from the community at large. Academia needs to consider what is needed from a scholarly communications infrastructure, and simultaneously build pragmatic and non-damaging transition strategies in order to utilize open access dissemination to its full advantage.

Fund, Sven. 2015. “Will Open Access Change the Game?” Bibliothek Forschung und Praxis 39 (2): 206–9.
 * Fund provides a general outline of the potential for open access to enlarge the scope of conversations in the scientific community. He compares the open access journal industry to the music industry since the turn of the century, and to the personal computing industry of the past several decades. In 2008, Spotify introduced a completely new business model that questioned the mechanism of buying music altogether, and the music industry could not continue its former economic policies. Fund argues that the lack of a shift towards a more updated model is what hurdles the breakthrough of open access in academia, rather than the absence of publication channels or lack of cooperation on the publisher’s end. In other words, it is the imminent structure of the library system, its decision making mechanisms, and the circulation of funds that limit the promotion of open access to a broader scope that impede on a swifter shift towards open access. In 2008, Spotify introduced a completely new business model that questioned the mechanism of buying music altogether, and the traditional music industry could not continue its former economic policies. He argues that the biggest hurdles for the breakthrough of open access is not the absence of publication channels, nor lack of cooperation on the publisher’s ends, but the imminent structure of the library system, its decision making mechanisms, and the circulation of funds that limit the promotion of open access to a broader scope.

Gaines, Annie. 2015. “From Concerned to Cautiously Optimistic: Assessing Faculty Perception and Knowledge of Open Access in a Campus-Wide Study.” Journal of Librarianship & Scholarly Communication 3 (1): 1–40.
 * Gaines argues that, while the academic community has a solid understanding of what open access is, very little research has gone into examining individuals' impressions of open access publishing platforms. Gaines surveys faculty members at one university in hopes of gathering data to fill in this information gap. A total of 240 surveys were administered and 54 respondents (23%) returned completed surveys. The majority of these respondents were from the sciences. Overall, the respondents had very little practical knowledge about open access: most knew what it was, but could not differentiate between types of platforms. The respondents indicated that the three key motivations in choosing a publication venue were prestige, impact, and personal recommendations. They felt that open access journals were unreliable and did not hold as much academic value. Policy is cited as a major roadblock, as many institutions do not have promotion and tenure guidelines that allow open access articles. Fear and misinformation resulted in a general lack of motivation to publish in open access spaces.

Gargouri, Yassine, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Tim Brody, and Stevan Harnad. 2010. “Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Impact for Higher Quality Research.” PLOS One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0013636.
 * Gargouri, Hajjem, Larivière, GringasGringras, Carr, Brody, and Harnad compare the impact of open access (OA) and non-–open access articles that have been archived in a repository due to self-selection or to journal mandate. They challenge the OA Advantage hypothesis that claims that articles published in OA according to self-selection are cited significantly more than those that are published because of mandate. According to the hypothesis, the articles that researchers choose to archive are their “best” work, or articles with the widest scope or most applicable research, which naturally leads to higher citation hits. By adopting a social science approach to test this claim, Gargouri et al. conduct a comprehensive study on journals that contain articles from all the aforementioned categories. The study found that there is actually no reduction in the OA Advantage for mandated OA articles (60%) in comparison to self-selected OA ones (15%). Another finding is that the impact or number of citation hits was not affected by whether the article was published through self-selection or mandate; the main increase of exposure results from being published in OA. Overall, authors of this article disprove the OA Advantage hypothesis and point to how publishing in OA is a productive means for increased exposure.

Government of Canada, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. 2015. “Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications.” Science and Technology for Canadians. http://www.science.gc.ca/default.asp?lang=En&n=F6765465-1.
 * The "Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications" provides a preamble in which the authors discuss the importance of agencies, such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), in advancing research. It highlights the role played by barrier-free access to research and knowledge, as well as how the internet has contributed to open access, multi-disciplinary, and collaborative scholarship. The webpage contains the policy objective and statement, which addresses peer-reviewed journal publications (online repositories and journals) and publication-related research data. The authors also provide information about the implementation date and compliance with the policy, and a policy review. They conclude with links to additional information resources.

Hampson, Crystal. 2014. “The Adoption of Open Access Funds Among Canadian Academic Research Libraries, 2008-2012.” The Canadian Journal of Library & Information Practice & Research 9 (2): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.21083/partnership.v9i2.3115.
 * Hampson summarizes and analyzes the adoption of open access publishing funds in Canadian institutional libraries. Open access publishing funds are allocated monies set aside to support the open publication of scholarly research. Hampson explores the emergence of this policy by studying previously published surveys between 2007 and 2012. She examines the surveys in light of the Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) in order to determine whether these types of funds are becoming standard in Canadian academic research institutions. According to the results, the trend of open access funds in Canada closely resembles the S-curve anticipated in positive IDT studies. Overall, Hampson argues that this demonstrates a pressure for continual support of open access funds and the need to closely evaluate the effectiveness of these monies. Hampson’s research forms part of the conversation that is pushing for the continued adoption of open access funds among Canadian academic research institutions.

Heath, Malcolm, Michael Jubb, and David Robey. 2008. “E-Publication and Open Access in the Arts and Humanities in the UK.” Ariadne.
 * Heath, Jubb, and Robey present an overview of the role of monographs, e-texts, and other e-books in arts and humanities related disciplines. Monographs are still relatively unpopular for open access publication in the humanities since many people find these difficult to read and prefer the printed form. The survey uses as its principal object the activities of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Research Information Network (RIN) to highlight a range of issues with open access monographs, journals, repositories, electronic publication of theses, and data publication. The authors point to the success of JSTOR as an open access repository; it is well known, however, that JSTOR requires libraries to pay a substantial subscription fee for access. The survey suggests that there is limited, slow progress to changing attitudes toward electronic publication. The academic community needs to develop a broader and more well-informed dialogue about what its needs are in regard to digital publication, and the issues endemic to publishing a monograph electronically.

+ Kingsley, Danny. 2013. “Build It and They Will Come? Support for Open Access in Australia.” Scholarly and Research Communication 4 (1): n.p. http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/viewFile/39/121.
 * Kingsley reflects on Australia’s adoption and support of open access policies over the last decade. He pays particular attention to the building of open access infrastructure, repositories, mandates, and funding bodies, and provides a full history of Australia’s open access movement. Kingsley uses the collected citation information as a test case for exploring the effectiveness and efficiency of open access publication. Finally, he concludes by providing some suggestions for improvement. Kingsley argues that developing an open access advocacy body, altering and updating the language of the current mandates, and introducing requirements for using open access platforms could help move Australia into the next phase of adopting this movement.

Kitchin, Rob, Sandra Collins, and Dermot Frost. 2015. “Funding Models for Open Access Digital Data Repositories.” Online Information Review 39 (5): 664–81.
 * Kitchin, Collins, and Frost outline financial models for digital open access repositories that are not funded by a core source. The authors create a list of challenges to open access, including Christine Borgman’s “dirty little secret”: despite the promotion of open data sharing, not much sharing is actually taking place. The authors propose that creating open access data repositories is not enough for attitudes in academia to change; substantial cultural changes in research practices must take place, and researchers should be encouraged to deposit their data as they complete research. The survey covers 14 potential funding streams for open access research data repositories. The authors argue that the lack of full, core funding and a direct funding stream through payment-for-use pose considerable financial challenges to the directors of such repositories. The collections that are maintained without funding are in significant danger of being lost to bit rot and other technological challenges.

Laakso, Mikael, and Bo-Christer Björk. 2012. “Anatomy of Open Access Publishing: a Study of Longitudinal Development and Internal Structure.” BMC Medicine.
 * Laakso and Björk measure the volume of scientific articles published in full, immediate open access journals. They take account of longitudinal internal shifts in the structure of open access publishing concerning revenue models, publisher types, and relative distribution among scientific disciplines between 2000 and 2011. The analysis is quantitative in method, and includes open access publisher output across geographic regions, number of articles by different publisher types, and disciplines. The survey creates a chart of all the articles indexed in Scopus and categorizes them according to year published, and whether they were published in full immediate open access journals, hybrid form, or delayed open access publications. The authors question whether open access will become the mainstream model for journal article publication, and if new entrants into the field, such as the Public Library of Science and BioMed central, will take over the market ground lost by the traditional publishers.

+ ** Lorimer, Rowland. 2014. “A Good Idea, a Difficult Reality: Toward a Publisher/Library Open Access Partnership.” Scholarly and Research Communication 5 (4): n.p. http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/180.
 * Lorimer comments on the state of scholarly publishing in Canada. He argues that, while open access policies are accepted in principle, they are not abided by in practice due to a lack of understanding and a need for the publishing sector to maximize revenue. The dynamics of open access are difficult and many individuals refuse to acknowledge this by claiming that a mere shift in business model will right scholarly production. Lorimer asserts that bold action in the implementation of open access practices across the community would be both irresponsible and self-defeating at this time. Instead, he advocates for deeper engagement by academic consumers who can exert more power in the marketplace as part of the shifting dynamics of print and digital publishing. He suggests seven best practices for proceeding into the new world of scholarly communication. One of these is to maintain effective and efficient records of research studies by disinterested researchers into the full potential and dynamics of open access.

Lowe, Megan. 2014. “In Defense of Open Access: Or, Why I Stopped Worrying and Started an OA Journal.” Codex 2 (4): 1–11.
 * Lowe outlines the general principles of open access publishing and discusses and defends the merits of her own production: the open access journal Codex. Codex operates by giving its authors full rights, except that the journal retains the right of first publication. Lowe claims that Bohannon’s 2013 study draws rather broad conclusions regarding peer review of open access journals and that authors seeking publication in open access journals should examine other venues, such as Codex. She declares that it is a mistake to pit the conventional model of publishing against the open access model. Furthermore, Lowe asserts, librarians should act as advocates for what open access means and share knowledge of its benefits with new patrons. Codex was started with the aim of helping librarians demystify the publication process, and to give new authors a chance to publish and gain experience in the field. She acknowledges issues of occasional fraud and scandal in open access publications, but argues that prioritizing accountability of information providers and upholding publisher ethics will help open access to become a mainstream vehicle for scholarly production.

+ ** Maxwell, John W. 2015. “Beyond Open Access to Open Content.” Scholarly and Research Communication 6 (3): n.p. http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/202.
 * Maxwell calls for radical openness in scholarly publishing, that is, moving beyond the ideas of open access towards a cultural transformation. He argues that as the humanities re-imagine themselves in the light of digital media, there is an increasing need for old practices to be thrown away instead of merely reconceived. For Maxwell, the print-based journal economy relies on limited access in order to maintain a profit. The economics of open access, however, could adapt a new system of openness to shifting market demands, opened by the web, that depend upon interconnection and interlinkage. Maxwell turns to agile publishing and its mission statement of “release early, release often” as an example of a more open movement. He questions how our scholarly work can be remixed, combined, reassembled, taken apart, and inscribed through an iterative process. Maxwell asserts that education, publishing, and scholarship can all be cultures of transformations.

+ McGregor, Heidi, and Kevin Guthrie. 2015. “Delivering Impact of Scholarly Information: Is Access Enough?” Journal of Electronic Publishing 18 (3): n.p. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0018.302?view=text;rgn=main.
 * McGregor and Guthrie write on open access from their perspective at ITHAKA: a not-for-profit organization that focuses on the wide dissemination of knowledge and is most well known for JSTOR, a large-scale digital library service. McGregor and Guthrie argue that free access alone is not sufficient for ensuring the broad dissemination, uptake, and impact of knowledge. The authors shift focus from access to what they term “productive use,” and they outline a series of conditions that they deem necessary for a scholarly resource to be considered effective from a knowledge-building perspective. These conditions include literacy, technology, awareness, access, know-how, and training. McGregor and Guthrie conclude that a sustained commitment to these conditions will inevitably heighten scholarly impact and bring the world one step closer to the goal of universal access to knowledge.

+ Meadows, Alice. 2015. “Beyond Open: Expanding Access to Scholarly Content.” Journal of Electronic Publishing 18 (3): n.p. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0018.301?view=text;rgn=main.
 * Meadows argues that open access should merely be the beginning of new trends of openness and access to scholarly resources. She summarizes and evaluates a series of public, low-cost access initiatives started between 1990 and 2014, including Access to Research; the Electronic Information for Libraries; the International Network for Access to Scientific Publications; the New School for Social Research’s Journal Donation Project; patientACCESS; and Research for Life. Meadows argues that these initiatives are valuable for publishers because they increase access to, and usage of, content beyond core markets. While Meadows acknowledges that open access is definitely not a one-size-fits-all challenge, publishers, small businesses, and medium enterprises all have something to gain from the movement: the opportunity to engage new audiences.

Ober, Josiah, Walter Scheidel, Brent D. Shaw, and Donna Sanclemente. 2007. “Toward Open Access in Ancient Studies: The Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics.” Hesperia. 76 (1): 229–42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25068017.
 * Ober, Scheidel, Shaw, and Sanclemente’s article presents the history of open access publication in Classics and Ancient Studies. Launched in 2005, the Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics (PSWPC) provides open access to a range of publications by faculty, postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars and, with permission, graduate students from Princeton University and Stanford University in an online database. The author makes mention of both the Perseus Project and the Bryn Mawr Classical Review as two early digital projects in classics that have become standard points of reference for ancient studies. The PSWPC allows scholars to circulate pre-publication works for popular reception. These are, however, non-reviewed and rely solely on the reputation of the authors who have submitted them. Ober et al. note that the certification process has been observed as the primary distinguishing asset of non-open access publication. Inadvertently, they argue that quality standards, determined by users rather than by a few editors, provide evidence in favour of open access in humanities and social science departments. The PSWPC was developed in order to encourage other departments at the two universities to consider open access and digital circulation as economical resources for university publication.

+ ** O’Donnell, Daniel, Heather Hobma, Sandra Cowan, Gillian Ayers, Jessica Bay, Marinus Swanepoel, Wendy Merkley, Kelaine Devine, Emma Dering, Inge Genee. 2015. “Aligning Open Access Publication with the Research and Teaching Missions of the Public University: The Case of the Lethbridge Journal Incubator (If 'if's and 'and's were pots and pans).” Journal of Electronic Publishing 18 (3): n.p.http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0018.309.
 * O’Donnell, Hobma, Cowan, Ayers, Bay, Swanepoel, Merkley, Devine, Dering, and Genee present a research mission summary for the group behind the Lethbridge Journal Incubator and detail how this project provides graduate students with early experience in scholarly publishing. The Lethbridge Journal Incubator trains graduate students in technical and managerial aspects of journal production under the supervision of scholar-editors and professional librarians. The project introduces students to the core elements of academic journal production workflows, and provides training in copyediting, preparation of proofs, document encoding, and the use of standard journal-production software. Using circle graphs, the authors demonstrate the significant increase in research time devoted to production tasks that improve research ability or knowledge. For O’Donnell et al., the key innovation of the Lethbridge Journal Incubator is its alignment of journal production sustainability with the educational and research missions of the university. The authors attribute the slow growth of open access to attitudes among those who pay for the production and dissemination of research. By unlocking the training and administrative support potential of the production process, the Lethbridge Journal Incubator promotes access within the University of Lethbridge.

** Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. 2015. “Making Open Science a Reality.” OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers 25.
 * The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development states that open science is an effort towards making accessible publicly funded research in digital format, and provides a rationale for open science. The authors discuss key actors in open science, including researchers, government ministries, research funding agencies, universities and public research institutes, libraries, repositories, data centres, private nonprofit organizations and foundations, private scientific publishers, and businesses. They also examine policy trends in open science, which could be mandatory rules, incentives, or funding. Their main findings include statements that approach open science as a means and not an end. The authors also explore open access to scientific publications and define open access in an exploratory manner by looking at it from various perspectives, with an interest in its legal implications.

Peekhaus, Wilhelm, and Nicholas Proferes. 2015. “How Library and Information Science Faculty Perceive and Engage with Open Access.” Journal of Information Science 41 (5): 640–61.
 * Peekhaus and Proferes conduct the first systematic exploration of North American library and information science faculty’s awareness of, attitudes toward, and experience with open access scholarly publishing. Following a thorough literature review, the authors argue that the sustained annual growth in journals in the past five decades has resulted in a contemporary multibillion-dollar scholarly publishing industry that is dominated by a handful of commercial behemoths who receive resources and funding from the wealthiest higher education institutions. Their survey indicates that while 80% of respondents had submitted an article to a subscription-based journal in the last year, only 37% had done the same in an open access journal. Further, just over half of the respondents had ever published with an open access journal. In terms of using institutional repositories, 35% of the respondents had deposited an article. Overall, engagement with open access is related to perceptions of faculty rank and promotion. While experience with open access platforms alleviates some concerns, a substantial bias remains.

Pinfield, Stephen. 2015. “Making Open Access Work.” Online Information Review 39 (5): 604–36.
 * Twenty years into the movement, Pinfield examines the challenges that still plague open access scholarship. Despite the growth of open access, Pinfield asserts that barriers to universal acceptance remain, namely significant levels of disinterest, suspicion, and scepticism among researchers. Much of the debate amongst open access advocates and other people, he argues, assumes that different types of open access frameworks (like green versus gold) are rivals. The author believes that popular understanding of open access needs to be further developed and uses the Research Information Network’s 2014 report as a framework for understanding the problems of accessibility, availability, usage, and financial sustainability of open access publication. Overall, the key issue of open access is transforming policy into practice—it is not a question of whether or not information should be open, but rather a question of how.

Prelinger, Rick. 2007. “Archives and Access in the 21st Century.” Cinema Journal. 46 (3): 114–18.
 * Prelinger seeks to understand how moving images problematize archival practices, and how the archive can reconcile legacy practices with new cultural functions. He outlines the history of the archive’s role in film preservation and how access to film materials has largely been conceded to web services such as YouTube and the Internet Archive. Open access, for Prelinger, is an important asset for film studies, as he notes that the field is of great interest to nonacademic audiences as well. The author is sceptical, however, as he does not see open access as a career-enhancing alternative for scholars who publish in comparatively expensive and limited access journals. Digital literacy goes hand-in-hand with rethinking access and copyright for the film archive. Prelinger argues that archival ethics should generally favour use over the fear of abuse, and that archives should cease to be wholesale repositories that rely on presenters, producers, and scholars to distribute the knowledge contained within them.

Rath, Prabhash Narayana. 2015. “Study of Open Access Publishing in Social Sciences and its Implications for Libraries.” DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology 35 (3): 117–83.
 * Rath discusses how, in India, the open access movement was initially confined to science, technology, and medical fields. Rath’s study identifies and analyzes 60 open access social science journals in India. Most of Rath’s findings consist of quantitative data compiled from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and she notes that only 15 out of 60 open access journals in the social sciences were published under a Creative Commons license in India. Rath concludes with several recommendations: that social science departments in India make publicly funded research available via open access, that research institutes encourage and fund their own repositories, that scholars deposit post-print copies of their research papers, and that a central advisory board monitors open access journals and encourages scholars to submit research papers to select publications in order to increase visibility of Indian publications worldwide.

RECODE Project Consortium. 2014. “Policy Recommendations for Open Access to Research Data.” https://zenodo.org/record/50863/files/recode_guideline_en_web_version_full_FINAL.pdf.
 * The Policy RECommendations for Open Access to Research Data in Europe (RECODE) Project Consortium provides an overview of the RECODE project and introduces the five interdisciplinary case studies in open access research data that helped in the examination of important challenges. The report includes a summary of the project findings and general recommendations. In addition, it studies targeted policies for funders, research institutions, data managers, and publishers, and provides practical guides for developing policies. The report also includes resources to further the policy development processes and their implementations. The authors conclude with a list of grouped resources and project partners

Rodriguez, Julia. 2014. “Awareness and Attitudes about Open Access Publishing: A Glance at Generational Differences.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 40 (6): 604–10.
 * Rodriguez surveys faculty members at a mid-size American university to determine the current awareness and perception of open access publishing. The majority of the respondents were from the faculties of arts, humanities, and social sciences. Overall, the data demonstrates a growing trend towards self-reported knowledge of open access accompanied by very little engagement with open publishing: while 61.7% of the respondents knew what open access was, only 28.2% had published with an open access venue. This demonstrates a gap between attitude and behaviour, a gap Rodriguez attributes to habits and institutional culture. In order to bridge this divide, she suggests educating faculty members early and revisting this discussion often.

+ San Martin, Patricia Silvana, Paolo Caroline Bongiovani, Ana Casali, and Claudia Deco. 2015. “Study on Perspectives Regarding Deposit on Open Access Repositories in Context of Public Universities in the Central-Eastern Region of Argentina.” Scholarly and Research Communication 6 (1): n.p. http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/145.
 * San Martin, Silvana, Bongiovani, Casali, and Deco survey and present qualitative statistics on the needs and practices of disseminating scholarly work through open access institutional repositories in Argentina. Their findings address issues of usability, navigation, and accessibility across three institutional repositories at Argentinean universities. In an online survey conducted by the authors, 1,009 individuals from the three universities responded to their queries about using open access institutional repositories. 81% of the respondents had a positive attitude towards freely disseminating their scholarly works. However, barriers of interface design, organization, terminology, and inconsistent metadata requirements prevented the use of the system. The authors propose a new prototype in order to help alleviate these issues.

Snijder, Ronald. 2015. “Better Sharing Through Licenses? Measuring the Influence of Creative Commons Licenses on the Usage of Open Access Monographs.” Journal of Librarianship & Scholarly Communication 3 (1): 1–21.
 * Snijder measures the influence of Creative Commons licenses on the usage of open access monographs. He suggests that there is, in fact, no evidence that making books available under open access licenses results in more significant download numbers than personal use licenses. For Snijder, the application of open licenses to books cannot, on its own, result in more downloads. Open licenses pave the way for other intermediaries to offer new discovery and aggregation services. Snijder’s study breaks away from the tradition of work on open licenses by measuring the effects of free licenses; he focuses on the implications of freely licensing open access monographs as opposed to discussing the legal frameworks surrounding copyright law and the Creative Commons.

Suber, Peter. 2004. “Open Access Overview.” Last modified December 5 2015. https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm.
 * Suber presents an introduction to open access, which he defines as literature that is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright/licensing restrictions. The open access campaign allows authors to give access to information to the public without requiring any fees. In this same vein, many open access initiatives focus on publicly funded research. There are two types of open access: gold (open access journals) and green (open access repositories). Both types of open access are compatible with peer review and, in fact, peer review is insisted upon in many open access venues. Suber also sees open access as well suited to copyright, revenue, print, preservation, prestige, quality, and career involvement. For Suber, open access is not a business model; it is a type of access that works to serve the interests of many diverse groups.

Suber, Peter. 2005. “Promoting Open Access in the Humanities.” Syllecta Classica 16: 231–46.
 * Suber examines how humanities and social science scholars can promote open access within their own disciplines. He identifies some of the roadblocks of open access publishing in the humanities and social sciences and proposes avenues that circumvent these barriers. Despite the internet creating an opportunity for low-cost distribution of knowledge, the humanities and social sciences have been slow to take up open access practices. Suber argues that this is due to a number of factors: high cost of journals, low funding of research, high rejection rates of journals, low demand for open access (compared to the sciences), and copyright issues. Suber suggests that the following practices be used to navigate or circumnavigate these issues: use software to manage costs of peer review; do without copyeditors, encourage universities to pay processing fees, experiment with retroactive peer review, explore open access archiving, and publish open access books.

Tanenbaum, Greg. 2014. “North American Campus-Based Open Access Funds: A Five Year Progress Report.” SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. https://sparcopen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/OA-Fund-5-Year-Review.pdf.
 * Tanenbaum provides an overview of the successes and challenges of campus-based open access (OA) funds across North America. The report provides quantitative data to show how the funds have encouraged authors to get involved with open access publishing. It also includes a qualitative analysis of the successes, challenges, level of satisfaction, and communication with faculty and administration. The author notes that launching funds at more institutions will highlight the impact of this mechanism on scholarly communication, and adds that “SPARC anticipates an ongoing involvement in campus-based Open Access Funds” (5).

Vandegrift, Micah, and Josh Bolick. 2014. “‘Free to All’: Library Publishing and the Challenge of Open Access.” Journal of Librarianship & Scholarly Communication 4 (4): 107–16.
 * Vandegrift and Bolick examine the role of library publishing in the open access movement. From the outset, Vandegrift and Bolick maintain that libraries should identify as “library publishers” and not “publishing libraries” in order to keep in line with the “free to all” policy. Further, the authors assert that clear distinctions should be made between university publishers, libraries, and commercial publishers. They argue that the goal of the library publisher should be to produce high quality scholarship that can be accessed by anyone. The authors see the primary issue facing open access as a question of alliance rather than compliance, and one that demands publishers to reconsider open access as a freedom, rather than a requirement or restriction. Moving toward this open access policy as a core principle of library publishing could shift allegiances, dissolve organizational categories, influence policy, and grow the community.

Veletsianos, George. 2015. “A Case Study of Scholars’ Open and Sharing Practices.” Open Praxis 7(3): 199–209.
 * Veletsianos addresses the extent of open scholarship in institutions that lack a formal infrastructure to support such research. He carries out a case study on Tall Mountain University—a public, not-for-profit North American institution—where he worked with faculty members. According to Veletsianos’s case study, there are a number of ways in which open scholarship is carried out, with certain practices being favoured over others, including open access manuscripts, open educational resources, social media, and open teaching/pedagogy. The author also found that some faculty members publish their materials openly on the internet, without attaching open licenses, and that the settings of the platform, as well as the institutional protocols, also affect the extent to which the material is accessible. Despite these findings, Veletsianos states that open scholarship is still a relatively narrow practice at the institution. The author outlines possible limitations of the research, such as open practices that may not have been revealed in the case study and possible limitations of Google Scholar (the search engine used for this research) that may prohibit the study from being exhaustive. Overall, the study is descriptive and does not address the motivations behind practicing open scholarship.

Waters, Donald J., and Joseph S. Meisel. 2007. “2007 Annual Report: Scholarly Publishing Initiatives.” Mellon Foundation.
 * Waters and Meisel summarize the findings of the 2007 annual report of scholarly publishing initiatives. The Mellon Foundation began two initiatives in 2007: the first initiative aimed to increase the capacity of university presses to publish first books by junior scholars in fields with constrained opportunities; the second sought to strengthen the substantive relationship between home institutions and university presses. Waters and Meisel briefly outline historical concerns about the roles and functions of university presses, and efforts to support scholarly publishing. They acknowledge early projects, such as Johns Hopkins University Press’s Project Muse, as well as the 1998-99 Mellon Foundation’s establishment of Gutenberg-e and History E-Books, which tested the hypothesis that monographs authored for electronic media would be cheaper to produce than those authored for printed media. The goal of the two initiatives aforementioned is to strengthen both humanistic scholarship and the institutions upon which it depends.

Willinsky, John. 2003. “The Nine Flavours of Open Access Scholarly Publishing.” Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 49 (3): 263–67.
 * Willinsky delves into the digital life of scholarly journals that was sparked approximately 340 years after their inception in print. Willinsky states that in 2000, nearly 75% of journals had online editions, and nearly 1,000 peer reviewed journals appeared only in digital form. The ease of accessing information is unprecedented; institutions, however, are simply unable to keep up with their own production of published research—no university can afford to provide access to all information. Willinsky turns to open access by first arguing that it is not a single economic model but rather a collection of economic models that fit different situations. He concludes by categorizing and detailing what he refers to as the nine viable flavours of open access scholarly publishing: e-print archive, unqualified open access journal, dual mode, delayed open access, fee based edition, partial open access, per-capita open access, open-access lite, and cooperative access.

Willinsky, John. 2006b. The Access Principle. Cambridge: MIT Press.
 * Willinsky argues that open access scholarship is a tradition that goes back to ancient collections, such as the fabled collection of Alexandria, and then to the establishment of massive public libraries in nineteenth-century America. He argues that digital publishers are responsible for exploring new technologies and economic models to improve public access to materials. Willinsky uses the New England Journal of Medicine as an example of a publisher that grants open access to issues six months after they are published and, on the first Monday of the month, makes the issue immediately accessible at no cost digitally. His discussion focuses on definitions of opening the scholarly community, access, copyright, a history of associations, economic factors, cooperative scholarship, development, the role of the public, the influence of politics, and the establishment of rights, as well as methods of reading and indexing open access materials. Willinsky concludes his study with an index of different models for open access publication, a chart that includes scholarly association budgets, journal management economies, and sections on indexing serial literature and creating metadata for journal cataloguing.

Willinsky, John. 2007. “What Open Access Research Can Do for Wikipedia.” First Monday 12 (3).
 * Willinsky interrogates the degree to which Wikipedia entries cite or reference scholarship, and whether this research is generally available to readers in open access format. The author is interested in whether contributors are taking advantage of the growing amount of open access research available to them. To study this, Willinsky randomly selected 100 Wikipedia entries, which reference 168 resources. Of those 168 resources, only 2% point to open access scholarly research. Given these findings, Willinsky argues that more can be done to enhance Wikipedia, and to bolster the current state of knowledge provided by the online encyclopaedia. Wikipedia, Willinsky argues, should be used as a platform to springboard open access initiatives and circulate materials in an accessible way for the entire internet community. If the platform were to become more of an entry point, researchers and scholars would have greater motivation to make their work open access.

Zheng, Ye, and Yu Li. 2015. “University Faculty Awareness and Attitudes towards Open Access Publishing and the Institutional Repository: A Case Study.” Journal of Librarianship & Scholarly Communication 3 (1): 1–29.
 * Zheng and Li study the awareness of Texas A&M University (TAMU) faculty regarding open access publishing. The authors assess their attitudes toward and willingness to contribute to institutional repositories and investigate their perceptions of newer open access trends and resources. The survey results suggest that tenured faculty have a higher engagement rate with open access journals in their fields. A lack of awareness, however, surrounds processes to deposit materials in institutional repositories: 84% of respondents did not know the institutional repository deposit process at all. Similarly, a quarter of the respondents indicated that they did not know enough about open access to form an opinion on institutional repositories, and could not see depositing their work as counting toward merit raises, tenure and promotion, or annual evaluation. Attitudes remain the greatest barrier towards increasing open access publication in academic settings.