In the past few months, the Clarion, the newspaper of the PSC-CUNY, has published three in-depth articles about open access to scholarly literature and textbooks.
- “Joint Action on Textbook Costs By Faculty and Students at Brooklyn College” by Nancy Scola is an excellent summary of the skyrocketing costs of textbooks and the consequences of those costs for students. It includes suggestions for how faculty can minimize the cost of course materials, including by assigning open access textbooks. (Note: There isn’t yet a tool for searching across all open access textbooks, but there is a guide that can lead you to many of the sites that offer them. One especially nice tool is this catalog of open access textbooks curated by the University of Minnesota. Of course, faculty need to evaluate any open access text before assigning it, but that’s no different from the need to evaluate any traditional text.)
- “Aaron Swartz and the Future of Academic Publishing” by Samir Chopra (Philosophy, Brooklyn College) is a smart look at the activism of Aaron Swartz, the insanity of the current system of scholarly journal publishing, and the movement toward open access. (For more on the insanity of the system, see our favorite (least favorite?) cephalopod.)
- “Open Access Comes to CUNY” by Nancy Scola summarizes the big Open Access Week 2012 event at the Graduate Center and introduces many key open access concepts and tools: open access journals, institutional repositories, subject repositories, SHERPA/RoMEO, the advantages for faculty and CUNY of open access, and efforts at CUNY toward creating an institutional repository.
Three is great, but they’re not done yet! The Clarion also welcomes us to send letters to the editor and/or article ideas about open access to their editor, Peter Hogness, phogness [at] pscmail.org.
