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Open Access

New York Times and Open Access

I was dismayed when The New York Times put up a paywall around its online content back in 2011. I get why they did it, but I was accustomed to getting their great content without the need for a credit card, username, and password. Living in central Pennsylvania, it’s impossible to get home delivery (and trust me, I’ve tried). Several local stores and gas stations carry a handful of copies, but you have to get there early in the morning to guarantee a copy (it’s often impossible to get a copy of the Sunday paper after 10 am).  An online subscription was a tough pill for me to swallow at the time, given that I didn’t have a physical artifact to hold on to, which would look nice on my coffee table and makes a great weed blocker in my gardens when I’m reading it.  And as an avowed cruciverbalist, the online edition does not allow me to indulge my daily ritual. Times change (no pun intended), and I no longer have any reservations about online-only subscriptions, so I’ve been an online subscriber to the Times (plus crosswords) for awhile now.

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Screenshot from the NYTimes homepage on November 7, 2016

This morning when I opened the NYTimes app on my iPad, I was greeted with this headline: “The New York Times to Offer Open Access on Web and Apps for the Election.” What caught my attention more than the fact that they’re offering free access was the way they phrased it: they used the term Open Access. They could have said “free,” “non-paywalled,” “complimentary,” etc., but they made a conscious decision to call it OA. I wish they used the phrase in the article itself to help contextualize my understanding of their rationale for using that term, but it appears only in the headline.

As an advocate for OA scholarship, I think I’m glad to see the term appear on the New York Times‘s homepage. My hesitancy here is that it’s not truly OA. The content is gratis, but certainly not libre. And when the clock strikes midnight on Thursday, all of the journalism that was freely available will once again be cloistered behind the paywall. Me being the eternal optimist, I’m seeing the glass half full here: non-subscribers will have free access for a period of time, and the phrase Open Access gets some big-time exposure, which will hopefully advance the cause. OA is really a paradigm shift, so making people aware of its existence and what it is and why it’s necessary is really the only way to get that pendulum swinging.

Categories
Open Access

International Open Access Week 2016

Happy International Open Access Week 2016!

What is Open Access? Peter Suber, a leading voice in the OA movement, describes Open Access scholarship as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder. OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review.”

On October 4, 2011, the faculty of Bucknell University approved an Open Access policy that grants the University rights to make their journal articles Open Access by publishing a copy in our institutional repository, Digital Commons. This means that faculty are able to upload their post-peer reviewed final manuscript to Digital Commons, so that researchers without subscriptions, or those who cannot afford expensive subscriptions, can access their scholarship for free, from anywhere in the world, as long as they can get online. Not only does the free accessibility lead to more downloads and citations, it serves as a public good by removing barriers to access.

For more information about Open Access, Bucknell’s OA policy, and how you can participate, please visit our Open Access Publishing and Scholarship page.