Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Harvard, after spending $3.7M on academic journals, pushes for open research

Some online academic journals have doubled in price since 2005.

Harvard faculty members were told this month that spending millions every year on scholarly journals “cannot be sustained,” and they were implored to publish their work in an open-access format while encouraging others to do the same.

The campus’s Faculty Advisory Council sent the bluntly-worded message April 17, sounding an alarm about the “untenable” model of buying and subscribing to journals that can cost as much as $40,000 annually.

Two providers of scholarly material have more than doubled their annual prices for online content since 2005, while Harvard spent more than $3.7 million for its collection of academic journals in 2011.…Read More

Universities commit to open-access journal movement

College students could have greater access to scholarly journals if open-source efforts gain momentum.
College students could have greater access to the academic research in scholarly journals if open-access efforts gain momentum.

A dozen major universities have signed a pact to make academic research available free of charge online and forgo the pricey subscriptions to scholarly journals that can cost campuses tens of thousands of dollars annually, creating barriers for professors’ research to be widely read.

Duke University on Oct. 3 became the latest American campus to sign the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE), an effort first introduced by Stuart Shieber, a computer science professor at Harvard University and director of Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication.

Nine U.S. universities have signed the pledge to “recognize the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers” and underwrite “reasonable publication charges” that could make it feasible for faculty members to submit research articles to the open-access program.…Read More