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True for University of California, true for CUNY

Michael Eisen (UC Berkeley professor and Public Library of Science co-founder) makes clear, strong comments about access to faculty scholarship in “UC Research Should Be Free.”  Read it and replace every instance of “University of California” with “CUNY”: just as maddening, just as true.

Don’t have time to read the whole article?  Start with this:

That the public does not have unlimited access to the intellectual output of academic scholars and scientists is one of the greatest-ever failures of vision and leadership from the men and women who run our research universities — all the more so at a publicly funded institution like the University of California.

And then think a bit about this:

No single action would accelerate this process more than a clear endorsement from university leaders that free public access to the works people produce is not just a good— it is a priority. The university should take the lead by making such a declaration and openly altering the criteria for hiring, tenure and promotion to emphasize the value and importance of public access and ultimately require it.

Here at CUNY, we all need to act.  Read.  Discuss with your departments.  Discuss with your administrators.  Discuss with your campus’s faculty governance bodies.  Discuss at University Faculty Senate.  Vote.

Some of us are doing this already.  Here are some of the open access resolutions already passed by CUNY faculty:

Departmental policies are important and meaningful, and I very much hope more departments will pass them soon.  But, ultimately, departmental policies are not enough for university-wide change.

No, some of us is not enough.  Everyone at CUNY needs to be tackling this problem.

Yes, that means you.

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Quantifying Open Access in 2012

Over at the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, open access advocate and thinker Heather Morrison takes a look at the astonishing growth of open access in 2012.  No hand-waving here; just cold, hard numbers:

  • The Directory of Open Access Journals now includes 8,461 journals, up by 1,133 since last year.  That’s an average of 3 new journals per day!
  • The Registry of Open Access Repositories is up to 3,032 repositories, up by 449 since last year.  An average of 8.6 new repositories every week!  (We hope to add a CUNY repository to the count soon!)
  • PubMed Central now includes a whopping 2.6 million open access articles, up by 300,000 since last year.  That averages out to 1 article every 2 minutes!

Read her full blog post for all numbers.  Any way you look at it, open access is growing, strengthening, speeding, surging. Put differently, open access is becoming inevitable.

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Don’t Take My Word for It

I know, I know, I’m always yakking about how CUNY needs an institutional repository to help faculty and others make their scholarly and creative works open access.  But it’s not just me, and it’s not just about CUNY — here’s a broader, bolder statement from Peter Suber (Harvard) and the Darius Cuplinskas (Open Society Foundations):

Every institution of higher learning should ensure that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles by its faculty members are made open-access through a designated repository that captures the institution’s intellectual output.

“Every institution of higher learning.”

Read more at Open Access to Scientific Research Can Save Lives.  (And yes, the article does give a fantastic concrete example of how open access can save lives.)

Of course, “Open access saves lives” is the flip side of “Closed access means people die.”