Open Access Archivangelism

Michael's Geist's article "Canadian Universities Too Closed Minded on Open Access" is timely and welcome, but it is nonspecific about just what it is that Canadian universities are closed minded about (or what they can do about it).

It's not about Open Access publishing ("Gold OA"). Those few Canadian universities that are journal publishers at all, are only very minor ones. The decision about whether and when (if ever) to convert to Open Access publishing is in the hands of the big international publishers (whose journals are also the ones to which access is most needed by authors and users, both in Canada and in the rest of the world).

Nor is Canadian universities making some of their scarce funds available to pay for Open Access publishing charges going to provide much Open Access either.

For Canada, Open Access is about providing Open Access to Canada's own research output, so that all potential users worldwide can access, use, apply and build on it, not just those whose universities can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it happens to be published -- and so that the findings of the Canadian researchers who did the research, and their universities, and the research itself, can receive the full usage and impact that they deserve.

The way to make all this happen is for Canadian universities to mandate that the final draft of every research article their researchers publish, regardless of which journal it is published in, must also be deposited in the university's Open Access Institutional Repositories, to make the research freely accessible to all users online ("Green OA").

That is what Canadian universities need to do in order to make all Canadian research output Open Access. That's what Harvard and Stanford and MIT (and 100 other universities and research funders worldwide -- but not Cornell, nor Athabasca nor York, but only the Library Department at University at Calgary) have already done.

If you want Canadian Universities to open their minds to Open Access, you have to know what to put in their minds -- and it's about what they need to mandate that their own researchers put in their own repositories.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum