Bennett, David

English

Name not available

The great information liberation  
– because everyone wants information to be free 
 
My enduring memory of cell biology lectures in my final year at university are of the 
lecturer bemoaning the fact that although he had found lots of really good articles that 
would help us understand the last incomprehensible lecture, the university could not 
afford them.  Research capability and the student experience are being damaged by 
journal subscription cuts as libraries struggle to manage overstretched budgets in the 
face of the relentless rise of journal prices.  Those who distribute published research 
findings and debates now dictate policy to those who actually do the research and 
debating.  The long tail is indeed wagging the university dog.   The situation is clearly 
unsustainable.  Librarians need to find new ways to help their institutions solve this 
problem. 
 
Based on the idea that just because you cannot afford something does not mean that 
you should not have it, supporters of the open access movement have long hoped that 
research institutions would begin seriously to archive copies of articles they publish in 
searchable repositories.  If everything that is published were archived using easily 
preserved formats and a common metadata standard, these archives would allow 
anyone to search for and access peer-reviewed article content in the open archives, 
whether or not they could afford the subscription to the journal in which the article 
appeared.   
 
After years of fierce debate and tireless advocacy by academics and librarians on both 
sides of the 'Pond', the battle for stakeholders' hearts and minds has finally been won in 
America.  At MIT, the library have taken over the University publishing business, both 
MIT and Oregon State University (OSU) have made their researchers give copies of 
their research publications to their libraries to archive and Boston University has also 
made self-archiving of all its research publications compulsory.  The future of 
scholarly publishing would seem to be ours for the taking.   
 
As the University of Portsmouth Library prepares to migrate to the latest version of the 
ePrints software that powers our open access institutional repository, through which 
we make both research and many of our student dissertations freely accessible on the 
Web, I am pleased by the thought that almost everything recently published will soon 
be available for free.  The days of people bemoaning the cost and difficulty of 
obtaining recent research will soon, happily, be a thing of the past. 
 
 
408 words 
 
 
_________________________________________ 
 
Soundbite:  "Just because you cannot afford something does not mean that you 
should not have it" 


The great information liberation – because everyone wants information to be free

Portsmouth University Research Portal (Pure)

https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal/services/downloadRegister/70431/Eclipse_(09May,_OA).pdf

The great information liberation – because everyone wants information to be free

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Portsmouth University Research Portal (Pure)