Working politically

In 2009, I led an effort among liberal arts college library directors to protest the Nature Publishing Group’s exorbitant increase in the online subscription price for Scientific American. We also cancelled our print subscription. This was not universally popular on campus because some faculty used articles from the magazine to initiate class discussion, but it was an opportunity to explain why we thought we had to hold the line on periodical prices and why OA might help. I have also served on the ACRL Government Relations Committee and the SPARC Steering Committee. Both play leading roles in advocating for OA. My own research concerns the history of copyright policy and libraries, and I have looked for opportunities to present that research to my colleagues and have built a reputation as someone with whom they can discuss scholarly communication and copyright issues.

Aggressively moving from print to digital periodicals

Obviously, most, if not all, academic libraries are migrating from print to digital periodicals. At Rollins we are doing so for common reasons that include user preference, space, and the ability to link articles to wider information systems, thus making them more accessible to our users. But, in response to flat collections budgets over the last few years, we also did a major print periodical cancellation project in 2008–09. We focused on print subscriptions because low use and increases in subscription prices have become unsustainable.

Working closely with faculty on this project increased their awareness of just how expensive the annual subscriptions to scholarly periodicals have become. The project was about cuts, but we described it as a necessary pruning. We made sure that faculty understood that if and when budgets improved, we would consider adding subscriptions to digital content. In the meantime, we continued to make them aware of OA journals and repositories and made sure to incorporate these open resources, through the Serials Solutions knowledgebase and the work of our liaison librarians, into our systems and services.

Exploiting resources and contributing to initiatives

If we encourage our faculty and students to use OA resources as information consumers, shouldn’t we also contribute to those resources as information producers? This question is particularly important to those of us who work in liberal arts colleges. The liberal arts originally meant the education appropriate for free men (from the Latin liber, free). Liberal arts colleges in the United States have built on this foundation a program of study designed to educate informed citizens and full participants in a democratic society. Rollins’ mission is to educate students as global citizens and responsible leaders, and we have a national reputation for community engagement. It is unthinkable that Rollins faculty, and by extension their students, would take advantage of open access to materials produced at the expense of others without also promoting open access to scholarly information that they create.

Rollins’s OA policy

Before we began working on the policy, we were given good advice by those who had traveled this road before us. So I pass this on to you:

• Find faculty champions for your OA policy. As a librarian, this should be your primary task. Once you have identified your faculty champions, then you can play a role in the background, providing information, answering questions, reassuring faculty that administering the repository is a role the library can perform. Most successful OA policy initiatives have been faculty initiatives.

The faculty champions on our campus were both members of the Professional Standards Committee: Thom Moore, a physicist who directs the faculty/student collaborative research program, and Claire Strom, a historian and journal editor of Agricultural History. Strom drafted the policy, Moore shepherded it through the faculty. Both are active researchers and well respected on campus and beyond.

• Develop the policy and the institutional repository simultaneously. This can be expensive in either time or money and could result in a successful implementation of the repository, but no policy. However, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Many colleges and universities have successful repositories of many kinds of materials, including faculty publications, without a formal OA policy. Building the repository at the same time as you press for the policy means that faculty will be able to see practical examples of how their works will be archived and accessed. This can reassure faculty in disciplines that are not already making extensive use of disciplinary repositories or who have a difficult time envisaging a transformed system of scholarly communication in which bound journals on the library shelves do not play a primary role.

• Find the message that resonates with particular audiences on your campus. At Rollins, faculty were interested in a more open system with more visibility for their own research and wanted a policy that recognized the diversity of their work and was flexible enough to enable them to get an automatic waiver when necessary (fully half of the publishing output of Rollins faculty is something other than the classic peer-reviewed scholarly article, such as books, textbooks, creative works, or nonscholarly professional or applied publications.) The provost was interested in institutional reputation and the dean of faculty was interested in the idea of a stable repository of faculty publications.

The policy passed the Arts and Sciences faculty unanimously in February 2010. The institutional repository site, Rollins Scholarship Online (scholarship.rollins.edu), went live at the same time. We spent the first half of 2010 tweaking the site and loading materials. In fall 2010, we received the data on last year’s publications, drawn from the annual reports each faculty member submits to the dean. David Noe, who administers the institutional repository, asked each faculty member to submit their publications that meet the criteria of the policy. He also assists them with submission or the waiver, where necessary.

Next steps

Once the policy has passed and the repository is up and running, your work has really only just begun. The tasks before us at Rollins include the following.

• Continuing to populate the repository. A few faculty members have chosen to self-submit but most have not. The reasons why faculty authors submit, or not, to institutional repositories could be the subject of another column.
• Passing a similar policy with the other faculty on campus. Rollins has two faculties, the Arts and Sciences faculty of the liberal arts college and the faculty of the Crummer Business School. So far, our early discussions have been very positive and we expect that faculty will look favorably on a similar policy.
• Reaching out to journal editors on campus—both faculty and students—and offering to host their content. Like most colleges, Rollins is home to a number of journal editors. Some are formal, scholarly society efforts, like Agricultural History. Others are home-grown products of the entrepreneurial spirit within the faculty, and still others are student publications. Our institutional repository can manage online journals, both open and toll access. So we are approaching the decision makers associated with each journal to determine whether they would like the online iteration of their journal to be hosted at Rollins Scholarship Online. This is also an opportunity to discuss the wider issues of OA with people who can have an impact on scholarly publishing on a wider scale than that of individual authors.
• Building other collections into the repository. With a small faculty, an institutional repository that only included faculty publications would be very small. But we can consider other collections. Wenxian Zhang, our special collections librarian and archivist, has proposed creating a repository of theses, which to this date have been housed in bound volumes in our archives. An investment group, managed by students in the Crummer Graduate School of Business, is interested in archiving their annual reports online and, in what we hope is the first of many such opportunities, a history professor has approached us to discuss how we might archive student-authored multimedia class projects.

We continue to work on other elements of our strategy to move the focus of the faculty and students of Rollins College on a larger information environment. The long-term work of collaborating and cooperating with other libraries in Florida continues, as does the similarly long-term migration from print to digital resources. We also continue in our political work in our efforts to persuade Congress that passing the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA, H.R. 5037) is good public policy that will improve access to federally funded research for researchers, consumers, and the students and faculty of liberal arts colleges. At least now Rollins can say we are putting our money where our mouth is.