CUL Action

What is Cornell University Library (CUL) doing about Open Access?
Nationally and internationally, the academic library community has actively supported open access to scholarly information. Libraries have played a key role in the scholarly publishing reform efforts of SPARC, which has come out as a strong advocate of Open Access and currently supports the Open Access News, the primary news organ on this issue. CUL, along with 106 ARL peer libraries, is a founding member of SPARC. In March 2004, the American Library Association co-signed the "Washington, D.C. Principles for Free Access to Science," in concert with nine other library associations, including the ALA's Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) division.

CUL is taking appropriate action by:

1. Fostering and supporting viable Open Access publishing initiatives that respond to or resonate with real needs of specific scholarly communities. CUL does not endorse a particular business model unconditionally. Any Open Access publishing strategy or initiative under consideration by CUL meets the following requirements:
   • It responds to and meets the needs of CUL's user communities and improves scholarly communication
   • minimizes detrimental financial, political, and cultural effects on scholarly exchange. The financial and organizational resources and intellectual output of the university community must be allocated in ways that will not produce new disparities between groups of authors and readers and will look to a more egalitarian future
2. Identifying and approaching a broad range of local stakeholders both to raise awareness among scholars at Cornell and to apprehend the needs and interests of various local scholarly communities
3. an outreach program around Open Access matters such as
   • November 2003 Cornell Editors' Forum
   • inviting speakers to campus
   • publicizing the activities of CUL's Electronic Publishing Program
4. Establishing a committee to monitor developments in Open Access publishing for the purposes of informing policies and decisions of the Library Management Team and raising awareness among CUL's constituencies. This committee issued a report in August of 2004
5. Collection development functions naturally include discussion and action around scholarly communication reform, including Open Access issues.

Current state of affairs

CUL has already taken a leading role in several initiatives that promote Open Access by supporting:

Open Access journals or aggregations:

PloS (Public Library of Science)

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. The Cornell University Library is an institutional member of PLoS, which provides Cornell authors with a 10% discount on the current author's fee which range from $1300 to $2850..

The Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) provides an international forum for the electronic and paper publication of high-quality scholarly articles in all areas of machine learning. The content is freely available on the web. Annual hard bound paper volumes are sold to libraries for archival purposes.

Subject-based e-print repository

arΧiv

Established in 1991, this well-known e-print service for physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, and quantitative biology is now maintained by CUL.

Institutional repository

The eCommons Digital Repository is open to anyone affiliated with Cornell University (faculty, staff, students, or groups/organizations) as a place to capture, store, index, preserve and redistribute materials in digital formats that may be useful for educational, scholarly, research or historical purposes.

Digital Publishing System Software

DPubS (Digital Publishing System)

Digital Publishing System (DPubS) is the name given to a set of software modules developed at Cornell that together meet a range of electronic publishing needs: access, navigation, and delivery of full-text content in a variety of file formats; subscription access controls; e-commerce services (pay-per-view); automated lookup and linking to other information resources (includes DOI registration, OAI compatibility, and reference linking); usage statistics for publishers and institutional subscribers; etc.

Subject Portals that provide Open Access to Developing Countries

AGORA - Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture

The AGORA site provides access to journals from major scientific publishers in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental science and related social sciences. AGORA is available to students and researchers in qualifying not-for-profit institutions in eligible developing countries.

HINARI

The Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) provides free or very low cost online access to the major journals in biomedical and related social sciences to local, non-profit institutions in developing countries.