2010 TAA Conference on Text and Academic Authoring

Ramada Mall of America Minneapolis, Minnesota

June 24-26, 2010

Academic Session:

Jeff Belliston

Open Access: What is it and What Does it Mean for Academic Authors?

Day/Time: Friday, 3:30 - 4:30 p.m.

Presenter: C. Jeffrey Belliston, Scholarly Communications Librarian in the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University

What is Open Access? The modern Open Access (or OA) movement has historical roots — some fairly recent and some much older. If one has a correct understanding of these historical roots, the OA movement will properly be seen as evolutionary rather than as revolutionary. In addition to this theoretical treatment of the "what is OA" question, a treatment of what John Willinsky has called the "flavors" of OA will elucidate the very practical side of the same question.

What does OA mean for academic authors? Just as with the "what is OA" question, there are multiple sides to the "what does OA mean" question. One side of this question are the practicalities of how an academic author would go about OA publishing. Because OA comes in various "flavors" there are a variety of ways a scholar can publish OA materials. As is to be expected, there are both commonalities and differences to all of these flavors and within these flavors depending upon one's discipline. Another side of the "what does OA mean" question deals with the benefit academic authors can derive from OA publishing. Were there no benefits, we would not see OA publishing taking off like it is.

This discussion of OA would not be complete without addressing current issues related to it, including the recent acquisition of BioMed Central by Springer (and the whole issue of the economics of OA publishing), the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, the NIH OA mandate the Act is designed to overturn, Harvard's OA mandate, and others.

About the Presenter:

C. Jeffrey Belliston was appointed Scholarly Communications Librarian in the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University in September 2007. He also heads up the library’s Office of Digital Content Management. Previously, Belliston chaired the General Information Services department in the library and led the implementation of the Information Commons. Prior to becoming a librarian, he taught high school and was a Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Department of State. As Scholarly Communications Librarian for Brigham Young University, Belliston oversees the university's open access repository, BYU ScholarsArchive; the BYU installation of Open Journal Systems, which is used to help journals produced at BYU, or edited by BYU faculty, use a web-based workflow and publishing platform (including Open Access publishing); the university's effort to implement a digital preservation program. He also works with the Library and Scholarly Communications Advisory Council to develop programs aimed at educating campus faculty and students about relevant scholarly communication issues. Chief among these is open access.