The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UT) has proclaimed support for open-access publishing of journal articles by signing the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE). UT is the eighteenth institution to join a roster of signatories that includes Harvard, Duke, Sloan-Kettering, and other preeminent research institutions.

Open-access publishing is an alternative to the prevailing business model of subscription-based journal publishing. Open-access journals are freely available online to researchers, scholars, and the public worldwide.

COPE was formed in 2009 to encourage equity of the two models of journal publishing.

For universities, open-access publishing offers several advantages over the traditional model. Open access insures that research and scholarly work will be broadly disseminated and discovered. Scholarly work and research results are published online, through journals and institutional digital repositories, and made immediately available to the millions of people around the world who have access to the Internet.

Open-access publishing also allows authors to retain copyrights in their own scholarly work rather than ceding copyrights to a commercial publisher.

Commercial publishers play a valuable role in the cycle of scholar communication. However, in recent decades inflation in costs of subscription-based journals has consumed an every larger portion of university libraries’ collections budgets.

“Open-access publishing offers an attractive and viable alternative to the scenario of ever-increasing journal subscription fees,” says Steve Smith, UT’s dean of libraries. Publication costs for open-access journals are borne on the front end by sponsoring organizations or through author fees (article processing charges) rather than subscription fees charged to the end user. “We are proud that UT’s Open Publishing Support Fund has, since 2008, been subsidizing publication in open-access journals,” declares Smith. The Fund, a project of the university libraries and the office of research and engagement, has to date underwritten the publication of 79 open-access articles by 48 faculty and graduate student authors.

The University of Tennessee has long had a policy of supporting and funding open-access publishing. A decade ago, a group of UT life sciences faculty requested that the university provide incentives for faculty to publish in open-access journals. The UT Faculty Senate endorsed the Tempe Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing in 2003 and passed a resolution in May 2006 endorsing administrative incentives to encourage faculty publication in alternative scholarly outlets.

“Joining COPE confirms the university’s commitment to a new culture of scholarly communication,” according to Taylor Eighmy, UT’s vice chancellor for research and engagement. “For tenure and promotion decisions, ‘peer-reviewed’ is ‘peer-reviewed,’ whether on paper or online. The ultimate goal is to create and disseminate new knowledge. Sharing UT’s research and scholarship is central to our mission as a land-grant institution.”

The University of Tennessee Libraries, in collaboration with more than 50 other academic libraries and the Educopia Institute, has joined a two-year project (2013-2014) to create the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC). As one of the founding institutions, the UT Libraries will play an integral role in the design and implementation of the LPC.

Academic libraries and the researchers and organizations they support are facing a new paradigm in scholarly publishing. The web, information and social media technologies, and the Open Source and Open Access movements are changing the framework in which scholarship is created, collected, organized, and disseminated. Yet, as shown by the highly regarded, Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded Strategies for Success project (http://wp.sparc.arl.org/lps/), library-based publishing groups lack a central space where they can meet, work together, share information, and confront common issues.

Through seed support from Educopia and participating institutions, the LPC project will engage practitioners to design a collaborative network that intentionally addresses and supports an evolving, distributed, and diverse range of library production and publishing practices.

During the first stage of the project, the LPC’s project team will document and evaluate how best to structure this initiative in order to promote collaboration and knowledge sharing for this field. The project team will produce several concrete deliverables, including:

• Targeted research, building on existing broader surveys, that will focus on topics of particular interest to the community, including costs, staffing, and how libraries are financing these ventures.

• Compilation of a directory of existing library publishing services, providing details including staff contacts, types of products produced, and software platforms utilized.

• A forum for networking and sharing communications about library publishing services, including an annual event and ongoing virtual training and community-building activities.

• The design and implementation of the Library Publishing Coalition as an ongoing, institutionally owned organization that serves the needs of this community.

Steven Escar Smith, Dean of Libraries at the University of Tennessee, notes that “the University of Tennessee is already a national leader in providing open access to our institution’s scholarship. Trace, our online archive of research and creative works, gives UT’s scholarship wider visibility and greater impact. And the UT Libraries’ digital imprint, Newfound Press, publishes works that are unlikely candidates for market-driven presses because of their narrow focus or innovative format. By joining the LPC, we will continue to work with other leading academic libraries to find new ways to lower costs and overcome other barriers to disseminating the products of scholarship.”

More information and a full list of participating institutions are available on the project website, http://www.educopia.org/programs/lpc.

About Educopia

The Educopia Institute serves and advances the well-being of libraries, information/research centers, and their parent institutions by fostering the advancement of shared information systems and infrastructures. Educopia acts as a catalyst to assist and advise libraries and other closely affiliated cultural memory institutions in the creation of new digital means of preserving and providing access to scholarly communication and the cultural record in socially responsible ways.

–

Contact:
Holly Mercer, Associate Dean for Scholarly Communication and Research Services, University of Tennessee Libraries, hollymercer@utk.edu, 865-974-6600