Scholarly Publishing and Open Access: Home

Image: Is Open Access a viable alternative to commercial journal publishing?

“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good.”

Budapest Open Access Initiative (Feb 14, 2002)

The movement toward open access is a relatively recent event in scholarly publishing, spurred on largely by increases in journal subscription prices, consolidation among commercial publishers, and efficiencies in digital technology that allow low-cost distribution and sharing.

Scholarly Publishing is the system through which research results and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use for other scholars, learners, and the public good.  The system is in a state of rapid flux and evolution, driven by new information technologies, low marginal costs of online distribution, and changing reader expectations.  

Authors have found new and creative ways of disseminating their scholarly work.  Over the past decade, Open Access has become central to advancing the interests of researchers, scholars, students, businesses, the public, and librarians. Increasingly, institutions that support research — from public and private research funders to institutions of higher education — are implementing policies that require researchers to make articles that report on research generated from their funding openly accessible and fully useable by the public.  

Scholarly Publishing has become an overarching term used by academic libraries to describe a suite of services that support academic researchers and authors - open access publishing, institutional repositories, electronic theses and dissertations, authors’ rights and copyright advising, research data management, digital preservation, open educational resources, and support for the tools of digital scholarship.