Options for Using Library Funds to Support Open Access Initiatives

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  Posted by Jill Cirasella (she/her) on February 14, 2019 at 2:39 pm

  At the last LACUNY Scholarly Communications Roundtable meeting, we discussed several articles, including Funding community controlled open infrastructure for scholarly communication: The 2.5% commitment initiative. Of course, it’s not always clear what projects are worthy of support — especially at CUNY, where library budgets are very tight. (For example, the Knowledge Unlatched project recently switched from being non-profit to for-profit, which has prompted ERAC to reconsider its support for the project.)

  Those of you who were interested in the 2.5% proposal, or the idea of committing library funds to open infrastructure (not APCs!) in any amount, may be interested in this article from the journal Collection Management: Using Library Funds to Support Open Access Publishing through Crowdfunding: Going Beyond Article Processing Charges. (Thanks to Alycia Sellie for putting this article on my radar!) Unfortunately, this article is not itself OA, so you may need to request it through interlibrary loan.

  What nice about the article is that it does item-by-item analysis of different OA initiatives that libraries can help fund. It doesn’t include all possible funding options (for example, I notice that Punctum Books isn’t mentioned), and it doesn’t discuss profit status of all the options it does include, but it does give helpful details about quite a few projects: Open Library of Humanities, Lever Press, Open Book Publishers, arXiv, etc.

  I know many in CUNY libraries wish we didn’t have to spend massive amounts of money every year on paywalled journals from the big for-profit publishers, and a key strategy in ending that practice is supporting non-profit, community-controlled open initiatives, so I hope we’ll keep this conversation going — both within the Scholarly Communications Roundtable and with collection decision-makers at our campuses.

• Jill Cirasella (she/her)

  Member

  February 14, 2019 at 3:03 pm

  Silly me: Unpaywall (which is a great browser extension for finding OA versions of paywalled articles — I highly recommend!) didn’t find it, but there in fact is an OA version of the article I mentioned. Here it is in the IUPUI institutional repository: Using Library Funds to Support Open Access Publishing Through Crowdfunding: Going Beyond Article Processing Charges.