Scholarly Communication: What Faculty Can Do
If your research is supported by the NIH, you might want to see this information about their February 2005 policy statement, summarized by Ruth Lewis, Biology Librarian: see the section titled NIH final policy on free access to medical research.
Participate in discussion lists
Create Change recommendations
The Association of Research Libraries’ brochure Create Change recommends a number of strategies for faculty wishing to become involved in reclaiming scholarly communication. Some are listed below:
- Encourage discussion of scholarly communication issues and proposals for change in your department, college, or university.
- Where possible, publish in open-access journals, which employ funding models that do not charge readers or their institutions for access. Serve on editorial boards or review manuscripts for open-access journals. (For a list of open-access journals, see the Directory of Open Access Journals at www.doaj.org).
- Include electronic publications in promotion and funding discussions.
- Encourage your society to explore alternatives to contracting or selling its publications to a commercial publisher.
- Encourage your society to maintain (or adopt!) reasonable prices and user-friendly access terms.
- Encourage your society to consider creating enhanced competitors to expensive commercial titles.
- Modify, if appropriate, any contract you sign with a publisher ensuring your right to use your work, including posting on a public archive (Suggested addendum to publishing contract).
- Carefully examine the pricing, copyright, and subscription licensing agreements of any journal you contribute to as an author, reviewer, or editor.
- Consider using your influence by refusing to review for expensive journals; by declining to serve on editorial boards of such publications; by supporting the library's cancellation of expensive, low-use titles; and by encouraging colleagues to do the same.
- Investigate your campus intellectual property policies and participate in their development.
- Invite library participation in faculty departmental meetings and graduate seminars to discuss scholarly communication issues.
- Encourage your institution or its local or regional consortium to set up an institutional repository to permanently archive the intellectual wealth of your institution (http://www.arl.org/sparc/repositories/).
- Deposit your research materials (including pre- and post-prints of your articles) in your local or regional institutional repository or your discipline's repository (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/).
- Familiarize yourself with journal cost-per-use studies, such as those conducted at Cornell and Wisconsin (www.createchange.org/resources.html).
- Submit papers to SPARC-supported journals in your discipline, serve on SPARC editorial boards, and/or agree to review papers for SPARC titles.
If you are a journal editor:
- Become involved in the business aspects of your journal.
- Use your influence, and that of your editorial board, to lobby for reasonable prices and access policies - other editors and boards have found this a successful strategy!
- Include your librarian when meeting with a publisher's representative.
- If warranted, consider moving your journal to a non-commercial publisher or creating an alternative journal.
Here is more information about Create Change.
Other suggestions
Washington University Libraries also encourage faculty to become acquainted with the goals and activities of SPARC, The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a worldwide alliance of research institutions, libraries and organizations that encourages competition in the scholarly communications market.
One further suggestion: take a look at the information in Ulrichsweb for any journal to which you're interested in submitting an article. This is a directory of journal information - including pricing. You might then check the online catalog to see if the WU Libraries subscribe to the journal you want to publish in!
Scholarly Communication homepage