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