Chronicle of Higher Education on Charles Schwartz article

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Of possible interest, CHE offers:

A glance at the November/December issue of College & Research
Libraries: Prospects for open access

Price inflation at academic journals is the central dilemma of "the
scholarly communication crisis," writes Charles A. Schwartz, associate
director for collection management at Florida International University's
libraries. The open-access approach might solve the problem, he says, just
not how its advocates imagine it will.

The goal of open access is to make academic research available free
through online journals, an approach that would overturn the traditional
subscriber-based business model of printed journals. Supporters of open
access say the research, often financed with taxpayer dollars, should be
made freely available instead of helping pad the bottom line of the
publishing companies and scholarly societies that produce the journals.
Critics say open access is based on an economically unfeasible business
model that will damage the societies, hurt peer review, and undermine the
research enterprise.

Mr. Schwartz says that open access will restructure academe, but in a way
that will "lead to a more costly scholarly communication system." The
change will not sweep through higher education, as open-access advocates
predict, but will come piecemeal, he says.

"As a rule, change occurs in the scholarly communication system within
groups, hardly across them," he writes.

Open access, he says, will replace the block-subscription deals that many
libraries have struck with journal publishers, whereby journals are bought
in packages. Many librarians abhor the system because it is pricey and
virtually eliminates the need for their expertise, he says. There will not
be one, climactic tipping point. Rather, he says, cost-effective
open-access business models will develop, discipline by discipline.

"Faced with hundreds of disciplines that have their own logics and
inherent bent toward self-determination, we have reason to be skeptical of
grand schemes and generic models," he writes. "The open-access movement
will progress the way other innovations do in a loosely coupled system, on
the strength of weak ties: the diffusion and eventual aggregation of
professional communities' best practices."

The article, "Reassessing Prospects for the Open Access Movement," is
available to subscribers at
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crljournal/backissues2005a/crlnov05/crlnov05.htm

copyright 2005 Chronicle of Higher Education

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