It's all a matter of perspective. In 1999, Napster changed the landscape of digital music sharing. The Recording Industry Association of America saw tens of thousands of users trampling copyright law, so they launched hundreds of lawsuits against individual users, notoriously teaming up with Metallica to prosecute fans. But where the RIAA saw thousands of binary pirates, Apple saw thousands of people looking to get their music via the Internet. In 2003, the company launched the iTunes Music Store; three short years later, the digital store now known just as iTunes sold its billionth song.
The university is trying to find the right perspective on free online scholarly journals, and right now, most faculty seem to be more Metallica than Steve Jobs. Last Thursday, the University Senate voted down a resolution encouraging faculty members to post their research in free online journals.
Administrators who supported the measure framed the debate in financial terms, seeing online journals as a means to resolve library budgetary problems. If our faculty members provide free online access to their research, the library doesn't have to subscribe to as many costly journals. Faculty members primarily saw the resolution as a threat to academic freedom, a roadblock to prestige and a measure that would disproportionately harm certain disciplines. Their concerns aren't baseless; publishing in some journals is more prestigious, and being published in selective journals is important for career advancement. But ultimately, both sides are missing the real opportunity.
In 2004, Kristin Antelman, the Associate Director for Information Technology for the Digital Library at North Carolina State University, conducted a study comparing the impact of articles posted to free online journals with those that were not. The study examined how often articles were cited, which is a common measure of academic influence - that's part of the reason why professors so often cite their own papers. Antelman examined the effect of free online posting across four disciplines; electrical and electronic engineering, mathematics, philosophy and political science. She found that being posted online enormously increases the number of citations of a given article, ranging from a 45 percent increase in philosophy to a 91 percent increase in mathematics.
Faculty members are correct in noting that publishing in some journals is more prestigious, but professors retain the rights to their research even after they post articles online, so they can still submit their articles to be published in many of those more selective journals. And if they're looking to have their work published in a journal that refuses submissions that have already been posted online, the Senate bill encouraged them to do so. The bill was a list of open-ended suggestions, primarily calling for educating faculty on the opportunities and benefits of publishing through free online journals, and it would only encourage faculty to publish their findings online "when practical and not detrimental to their careers."
The transition to publishing academic research in free online journals may not yet be a done deal, but the shift has begun. This February, Harvard University's arts and sciences faculty voted to adopt a system in which every research article would instantly be made available online free of charge unless a faculty member specifically requested otherwise. You're still doubtful that making articles available in online journals makes them more influential? We found Antelman's article because it was available online free of charge, and we just reprinted her findings 16,000 times.
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