What Faculty Can Do

The ACRL brochure Create Change recommends a number of strategies for faculty wishing to become involved in reclaiming scholarly communication. Some are listed below:

As an author:

• Manage your copyrights by modifying any copyright agreements you sign with a publisher to ensure that you retain the rights to use your work as you see fit.
• Deposit your research materials in the University Library’s Institutional Repository.
• Become aware of the pricing policies of journals (including commercial electronic journals) in your field.
• Submit papers to quality journals that have reasonable pricing practices.
• Where possible, publish in open access journals, which employ funding models that do not charge readers or their institutions for access. Notify unreasonably expensive journals in your subject area or discipline of your decision to submit elsewhere. To find peer-reviewed open access journals in your field, see the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

As a reviewer:

• Consider declining offers to review for unreasonably expensive journals. Notify the journal of the reason for your refusal.
• When asked to referee a paper for an open access journal, accept the invitation.

As an editor:

• If you are an editor or on the editorial board of a subscription journal, examine the pricing practices of that journal. If appropriate, start an in-house discussion on pricing.
• Consider relinquishing editorial posts with unreasonably expensive journals. Notify the journal of the reason for your refusal.
• Encourage your publisher to investigate open-access business models. Resources to aid in their planning are available from The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
• Serve on editorial boards for open-access journals. For a list of open-access journals, see the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

As a society member:

• Encourage your societies to maintain or adopt reasonable prices and user-friendly access terms.
• Encourage your societies to explore alternatives to contracting or selling their publications to a commercial publisher.
• Encourage your societies to consider open access or delayed open access (e.g., free access after six months) for their own journals.
• If the copyright transfer agreement used by your society’s journals doesn’t allow authors to deposit their papers in open archives (such as the library’s Digital Archive), ask them to change their policy.

As faculty:

• Encourage discussion of scholarly communication issues and proposals for change in your department, college, or university.
• Invite library participation in faculty departmental meetings and graduate seminars to discuss scholarly communication issues.
• Deposit your research and departmental materials in the library’s Digital Archive.
• When sitting on grant-review panels or hiring, tenure, or promotion committees, give due weight to peer-reviewed publications regardless of their price, medium, or business model. Don’t rely solely on prestige or impact factor as this discriminates against new journals that may be of high quality.

As a teacher:

• Educate the next generation of scientists and scholars about the benefits of sharing their research. Explain to your students that open access is compatible with peer review, copyright, and career advancement.
• Reserve the right of your articles to be used in the classroom without fee—use an author addendum, such as the SPARC Author Addendum.

For comments, questions, and suggestions, contact your department’s Subject Librarian or Tammy Sugarman, the Associate University Librarian for Research Services.

Scholarly Communication | The Issues |
Alternative Publishing Models | Copyright |
What Faculty Can Do | What the Library is Doing