Open Publishing Support Fund
Increasing the Impact of UTK Research Through Open Access
Co-sponsored by UTK’s Office of Research and the University Libraries
Program Announcement - October 2008
The University Libraries and Office of Research have launched a pilot program, Open Publishing Support Fund for faculty and graduate students to request funding for “article processing charges” that support open access publishers such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and BioMedCentral.
Open access publishing is a model for the communication of research and scholarship with the following characteristics: 1) materials are in digital format; 2) on the Internet; and 3) freely available to users. Open access insures that scholarly work will be broadly disseminated and discovered. It is provided primarily through journals and institutional archives (sometimes called repositories).
Open access publishing is one cost-effective alternative to the traditional subscription-based publishing model. Peer-reviewed scholarly works created with no expectation of direct monetary return can be freely available to readers via the Internet. Key benefits of open access publishing are that authors retain their copyrights and receive greater exposure for their research results. Open access journals are freely available throughout the world, for anyone to read, download, copy, distribute, and use with attribution.
A group of University of Tennessee, Knoxville life sciences faculty recently requested that the university provide incentives for faculty to publish in open access journals. The University of Tennessee Faculty Senate endorsed the Tempe Principles1 for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing in 2003 and passed a resolution in May 2006 2 endorsing UTK administrative incentives to encourage faculty publication in alternative scholarly outlets. Given the increasing campus awareness about overpriced commercial journal subscriptions, it is gratifying, indeed, that UTK researchers want to create change in our publishing and tenure/promotion culture.
Scholarly communication is the lifeblood of the university—dissemination of knowledge is central to Tennessee’s land grant mission. Because threats to the free flow of research and ideas jeopardize the entire academy, administrators, scholars, and librarians are pursuing options to “reclaim” research produced in the academy. The cost to produce digital open-access literature, generally lower than publishing print literature, is borne by researchers and their sponsoring organizations. This pilot program demonstrates the university’s commitment to support faculty publications that offer maximum public access, a goal in harmony with the University’s land grant mission.
Experiments with alternatives to make scholarly research easily accessible to scholars, students, and the world at large are leading to new opportunities for disseminating peer-reviewed articles. The University of Tennessee strives to make the greatest impact possible from research results produced at the university.
Barbara Dewey
Former Dean of Libraries
bdewey@utk.edu
Bradley Fenwick
Vice Chancellor for Research
vcresearch@utk.edu
1. Tempe Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Communication, http://www.lib.utk.edu/colldev/tempeprinciples.pdf. Accessed August 15, 2008.
2. Faculty Senate Resolution on Scholarly Publishing, http://www.lib.utk.edu/colldev/scholarlypublishingresolution.pdf. Accessed August 15, 2008.
What is Open Access?
Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, and freely available to users... more
