Open access within legal academia provides a case study for the effective use of digital formats to promote scholarship. The presenters review the background historical developments in this field, and consider the benefits and rationales for providing open access to legal scholarship, including the special faculty concerns arising from SSRN and its relationship to the institutional repository.
How have faculty sustained the most successful examples of longstanding OA publications? This panel by faculty editors of OA publications will discuss the strategies and operational models that they have implemented to sustain individual OA journals over a decade or more.
As the library, publishing, and research communities continue to experiment with and implement new models for publishing OA content, it is important that we explore and understand how libraries can work collectively to have a broad impact on scholarly communication, as well as the challenges and opportunities that these developments present for long-term preservation of these publications.
The scholars now entering fields of research will be the ones who inhabit the changed landscape of scholarly communication in a few years. A panel of young scholars advocating for Open Access will discuss their perspectives on the prospects for this evolving landscape of OA publications.
The presentation will look at Open Access publishing today, and why universities should fund Gold OA in addition to Green OA and the benefits which publishing in fully open access journals bring to authors and their institutions. It will go on to look into the ways in which fully open access publishing is funded through grants and institutional memberships, and the options available to institutions considering a gold open access mandate including some case studies of BioMed Central member institutions.
University presses have two missions: to stay in business and to disseminate knowledge. Open access is a means of achieving the latter, but it can pose a threat to the former. Currently presses are struggling to find a way of reconciling the two, and attitudes differ among press directors. This talk will explain why open access is both a challenge and an opportunity for presses today.
