Open access

Libraries will champion an open future for scholarship

All of us who work in academic libraries here in Pittsburgh and around the world aspire to improve the quality of science and scholarship. It’s increasingly clear that this can best be done through the open exchange of ideas and data, which can accelerate the pace and reach of scientific discovery.

The desire of researchers and their funders to make their research freely available to all is evident. As a result, the acceptance of open access publishing and article sharing services has soared in recent years. Meanwhile, the rapidly escalating journal costs experienced by libraries over the past 25 years are agreed to be unsustainable. It is against this backdrop that Carnegie Mellon University is establishing open access agreements with top journal publishers, with a special focus on the the fields of science and computing.

Most recently, CMU joined three fellow premier research institutions in reaching new open access agreements with the Association for Computing Machinery, the university’s largest publisher. CMU collaborated with the University of California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Iowa State University in developing a new publishing model that is expected to influence ACM’s future open access agreements.

Starting this year, CMU researchers publishing in ACM journals, conference proceedings and magazines will be able to make their work publicly available without incurring costs. This comes only two months after CMU reached a transformative agreement with the publisher Elsevier that prioritizes free and public access to our research and scholarship. It was the first agreement of its kind between Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher, and a university in the United States.

These two agreements represent a new relationship between universities and scholarly publishers. They also seek to reflect the wishes of academic authors that their work be as widely readable as possible, and of publishers to support a move toward open access publishing.

In recent years, research funders have increasingly mandated grantees to secure open access publication for outputs arising from funded research. These initiatives have all sought to stimulate greater adoption of open access but have typically taken the form of per-article payments to publishers in addition to existing library subscription fees.

Carnegie Mellon, as one of the world’s leading universities, has a responsibility to take action. As taxpayer funding supports much of our research, we want to secure the widest possible access to our scholarly work. We also have to address the impact of rising journal costs on our ability to support other activities. Like many of our peers, our library spending has shifted considerably toward journal subscriptions in recent years.

Carnegie Mellon’s recent agreements with ACM and Elsevier are the latest in a series of university decisions to promote open access. They also represent two different business models for academic publishing that could benefit other institutions. ACM plans to incorporate the principals of its joint agreement into a model, called ACM OPEN, which they’ll make available to other universities. The company hopes to move into full open access in the coming years.

I salute the progress made by librarians all over the world who have developed open access contracts, including my collaborators on this deal, as well as those with contracts with other publishers. Great progress has been made, but we need to do more if we are to address the wishes of the scientific community. We can no longer accept restrictive readership licenses that do not build momentum toward open access. The alternative to open access is increasingly unaffordable price increases and constrained access that restricts the creation and dissemination of research.

Our university bears the name of business titan and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, whose personal donations defined the library of the 20th century. Carnegie was driven by his desire to make knowledge and education accessible to the working class, so they would have the tools to better their own condition.

Through our advocacy and leadership in open access we seek to build upon our founder’s legacy and define the library of the 21st century.