OhioLINK Recommends Steps to Ensure That Ohio Remains Available to Ohio Scholars

OhioLINK Recommends Steps to Ensure That Ohio Research Remains Available to Ohio Scholars

Columbus, Ohio (August 30, 2006) – Ohio faculty, scholars and researchers publish thousands of scholarly articles each year, in the world's leading scholarly journals. Yet there is no guarantee that Ohio will have access to research produced by its own scholars as the costs and quantity of scholarly journals keep rising beyond the reach of Ohio higher education. OhioLINK, a consortium of 85 academic libraries and the State Library of Ohio, has released recommendations that will help authors and their institutions retain the right to disseminate their works electronically, thereby assuring access to Ohio research for the Ohio scholarly community and beyond. The recommendation document, including a sample author publication agreement, is available for downloading at www.ohiolink.edu/journalcrisis .

OhioLINK also recommends placing research articles and related material in freely accessible digital repositories, such as its own Digital Resource Commons. This will help ensure that research published by Ohio scholars will be openly accessible for research and scholarship.

“The OhioLINK library community believes that research and works produced by Ohio scholars should remain accessible to scholars in Ohio and beyond, regardless of whether that scholar’s institution can afford to buy the published research. These recommendations move Ohio another step closer to turning that belief into a reality,” Tom Sanville, OhioLINK’s executive director, said.

Some of OhioLINK’s recommendations to Ohio institutions, faculty and other researchers include:
1. Publish in journals that have responsible rights policies whenever possible.
2. Retain the non-exclusive right to make works openly accessible and usable for the author’s own non-commercial educational and research purposes.
3. Deposit works in a campus repository or the Ohio Digital Resource Commons so that those works are available to scholars in Ohio and beyond.

In making these recommendations, OhioLINK joins many organizations around the nation and the world who are seeking to protect authors’ rights to freely disseminate their own works, including the University of California, The Boston Library Consortium and the European Commission. While many journal publishers have changed their policies to embrace an author’s right to archive and share their own works for educational and research purposes, it remains the author’s responsibility to ensure they do not sign away their rights in publisher agreements.

Kudos to OhioLINK!

Peter Suber presents an excellent summary of the key points relating to open access, and useful comments on Open Access News.