Today scholars, publishers, and librarians, are developing a number of alternatives to the traditional subscriber-restricted journal system. Most of these alternatives focus around the open distribution of scholarly information via the Web, and fall under the general term of "open access." Why has open access become so important? Because for the past two decades the cost of journals has risen much faster than either the consumer price index, or library funding. As a result journal cancellations and reduced book purchases are an annual phenomenon in libraries throughout the world. As a consequence, every year traditional subscriber-restricted journals are available to fewer and fewer scholars.
Open access may take the form of posting traditionally published articles (in the author's final draft version) on the Web where they are available to everyone, publishing in one of the thousands of open access journals, or making scholarly material openly available in a variety of other ways. Several recent studies have demonstrated that, as expected, peer-reviewed open access journals are cited more frequently than traditional journals.
Funding agencies around the world, including the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH), are very interested in having the research they fund being made easily accessible to all scholars, and no longer locked up in relatively inaccessible, limited distribution expensive traditional journals.
The NIH now requires that all funded investigators submit to PubMed Central an electronic version of the author's final manuscript which will be made freely available to the public as soon as possible after publication, but in no event later than 12 months after publication.
Instructions and information are provided in the links below, including the NIH policy, the University's response to it, as well as additional background information on scholarly communication issues, options, and solutions, explanations of the role of copyright, and articles on related topics that can be shared with colleagues.
