http://www.bu.edu/today/node/8320

Boston University took a giant step towards greater access to academic scholarship and research on February 11, when the University Council voted to support an open access system that would make scholarly work of the faculty and staff available online to anyone, for free, as long as the authors are credited and the scholarship is not used for profit

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“We believe this is the first time that a university as a whole has taken a stand on behalf of the university as opposed to a single school or college,” says Wendy Mariner, the chair of the Faculty Council and a professor at the School of Law, at the School of Public Health, and at the School of Medicine. “We are looking forward to new forms of publication in the 21st century that will transform the ways that knowledge and information are shared.”


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The increased ownership and control is good news for researchers such as Barbara Millen, a professor and chair of the graduate nutrition program at the School of Medicine. Working on a book about nutrition research at one point in her career, Millen found herself in the paradoxical
position of having to seek permission to use her own data after it was published in a journal that retained the copyright to her work. The challenge, says Millen, who cochaired the University Council committee that recommended the open access initiative, will be providing faculty
with the tools to make their research available online.


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Traditionally, academic journal publishers have used subscriptions to cover the costs of printing, marketing, and distribution. Many also
charge a per-page fee to researchers whose work they publish, which can add up to thousands of dollars. The journals control access to the
published papers, because they often hold exclusive copyright. Thanks to the Internet, printing presses and expensive distribution networks are no longer needed, but there are still costs for editing, marketing, and other logistics, even for online journals, and open-access journals typically charge scholars a flat processing fee to cover these costs.
For example, BioMed Central, the for-profit publisher of Environmental Health, charges authors $1,700.

Some universities, such as the University of California, are footing the bill for their faculty’s open-access publishing fees, and in other cases, researchers have included these fees as a line item in their grant applications. At least one major source of grants, the National
Institutes of Health, recently mandated that any research it funds must be open-access within a year after publication.