Last Friday's Open Access event, attended by library committee members, faculty, residents, students, and staff, highlighted the benefits of retaining copyright for your published works and making your research available to everyone, regardless of access barriers. As Dean Goldschmidt emphasized in his opening remarks, "Our job is to make access to knowledge as easy as it can be."
Dr Mary Moore introduced our engaging, invited speaker Heather Joseph, Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. Ms Joseph illustrated the current state of the publishing industry by comparing the prices of licensing journals with luxury items. For example, the cost of a year's worth of access to the Journal of Econometrics is $2,155, equivalent to the price of a MacBook Air, the Journal of Geophysical Research costs $5,760 a year, equivalent to a Tiffany diamond ring, and the journal Brain Research costs $21,744, the same as a new Honda Accord. In total, the scientific, technical, and medical journal industry is a $9 billion market, comparable to the NFL. Clearly something needs to be done to regulate the exponentially rising journal prices.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative, established in 2001, was the first attempt to unify over this issue of providing access to research to everyone. To date there are now 7,000 journals available in the Directory of Open Access Journals, including journals with the highest impact factors in their field. Half a million people are accessing freely-available articles in PubMed Central every day. This movement is growing, but Heather Joseph stressed the need for our support and diligence to see it continue to flourish.
To this end, John Renaud, Director of Collection Strategies and Scholarly Communication at the Richter Library, showcased the University of Miami's Scholarly Repository, where UM faculty and students are invited to share their published works, theses, and other research materials (as allowed by their copyright agreements). Please contact John Renaud or your Calder librarian to learn how you can share your work in the repository, increasing access to and visibility of your research. Many thanks to the Calder Library's Scholarly Communications Committee (Jenny Garcia-Barcena, Brenda Linares, Vedana Vaidhyanathan, and JoAnn Van Schaik) for organizing this outstanding event.