Tuesday, March 29th 2 – 4 p.m.
Smith-Buonnano Hall, Room 106
Featured speaker: John Saylor,
Director of Collection Development, National Science Digital Library
Director of Cornell University Engineering Library
John M. Saylor is the Principal Investigator for the NSF funded (2002-2004) and IMLS funded (2004-2006) K-MODDL project. He has been the Director of the Engineering Library at Cornell University since 1988. He has been involved in many digital library efforts including the National Science Foundation (NSF) Synthesis Coalition from 1990-1995 and was co-Principal Investigator of Cornell University’s portion of the core integration grant from NSF to build the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) from 2000 through September 2002.
Open Access presents a paradigm shift in scholarly research and publishing. Open access is putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature on the internet, available free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. It is considered by some to be the answer to scholarly publishing issues like access and cost!
At the Library Forum on March 29th, Mr. Saylor will report on the findings of Cornell’s Task Force on Open Access Publishing, which he chaired. As reported on the Cornell web site (see link below) “Alternative publishing models that would offer free and unimpeded access to scholarship promise both a more affordable system for academic institutions and their libraries and a more democratic one for readers and authors”. The Cornell task force examined the Open Access “promise” and concluded that both traditional subscription publications and open access publishing will coexist for the foreseeable future. http://hdl.handle.net/1813/190
No doubt, you have noticed the recent announcements about Open Access from the National Institutes of Health, regarding “a new policy designed to accelerate the public’s access to published articles resulting from NIH-funded research. The policy…calls on scientists to release to the public manuscripts from research supported by NIH as soon as possible, and within 12 months of final publication. These peer-reviewed, NIH-funded research publications will be available in a Web-based archive to be managed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of NIH. The online archive will increase the public’s access to health-related publications at a time when demand for such information is on a steady rise”.
An additional up-to-date overview of Open Access, see: SPARC Open Access Newsletter
John Saylor’s powerpoint is available at: http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/University_Library/disgroups/oasc.html
For further information contact Raynna_Bowlby@brown.edu

Discussion of Open Access has been prevalent in both the scholarly and popular press.
From the December 18, 2003 issue of Nature:
“Will the scientific literature in the future be dominated by journals that do not charge their readers? That is the goal of the ‘open-access’ movement, which argues that the costs of publishing should be borne up front by those who fund research, rather than those who want to read about it”.
From December 19, 2003 issue of Science Magazine:
“Open sesame. Will 2004 be the year scientists open their hearts — and their wallets — to open-access scientific journals? A slew of publishers will launch experiments in which authors will pay publication charges and journals will make their papers freely accessible over the Internet. Advocates say that the author-pays approach will speed the flow of scientific information, but critics predict that the business model will be a flop, particularly outise the relatively flush biomedical sciences”.
From the December 30, 2003 issue of the Wall Street Journal:
“Why should Americans pay to see the results of research underwritten by their tax dollars, open-access proponents argue? Their aim instead is to make that information available free to everyone on the Internet. And in doing so, they threaten established journal publishers. Critical to making open access succeed is instilling it with the same kind of quality peer review found in hard-copy journals”.