This year’s Open Access Week theme, “The Cost of Knowledge,” asks us to consider who bears the costs of scholarly publishing and how that impacts both who can contribute to and who can access knowledge.
Research is not free. Creating it requires resources and time, as does publishing and sharing it. Open access (OA) makes research available to readers without a paywall. However, some OA models remove the reader paywall by shifting costs to authors or institutions. Scholarship is global and access to publishing resources can vary greatly. When researchers or their institutions cannot pay publishing fees, their options for sharing their work narrow. We would like to see additional solutions that reduce barriers to accessing, and publishing, research so that scholarship can reach the widest possible audience.
Libraries are well positioned to help. We build and sustain systems that enable people to share, discover, and apply knowledge. At Harvard Library, we worked with faculty to establish the University’s open access policies that reserve the right for faculty in the Harvard community to share their scholarship freely. Through Harvard Library’s open-access DASH repository, we now make over 72,500 works of Harvard scholarship openly available to all. Our Harvard Library Open Journals Program supports academic journals that charge neither authors nor readers — advancing a model of scholarly publishing that is open, sustainable, and accessible to more people. For a deeper look at these ideas, I encourage you to read our Open Access Week blog post.
This year’s Open Access Week keynote, “No Fees? No Problem: Advancing Diamond Open Access” will explore more community-supported publishing models as viable alternatives. This is the shared work of the scholarly community — to consider publishing models that enable researchers to participate regardless of resources, while allowing more people to discover and benefit from the knowledge they create.
I hope you will join us for Open Access Week at Harvard Library, October 19–25, and in the larger work of building open and sustainable scholarly publishing models that make knowledge open to all.