Five universities commit to the open-access compact

Five universities—Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley—have now expressly stated their commitment to the importance of supporting the processing-fee business model for open-access journals just as the subscription-fee business model used by closed-access journals has traditionally been supported. These universities are the initial signatories of a "compact for open-access publishing equity" (COPE), which states:

We the undersigned universities recognize the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals’ contents. Those universities and funding agencies receiving the benefits of publisher services should recognize their collective and individual responsibility for that funding, and this recognition should be ongoing and public so that publishers can rely on it as a condition for their continuing operation.

Therefore, each of the undersigned universities commits to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds. We encourage other universities and research funding agencies to join us in this commitment, to provide a sufficient and sustainable funding basis for open-access publication of the scholarly literature.

MIT provost Rafael Reif says "The dissemination of research findings to the public is not merely the right of research universities: it is their obligation. Open-access publishing promises to put more research in more hands and in more places around the world. This is a good enough reason for universities to embrace the guiding principles of this compact."

These universities realize that in the long run, underwriting processing fees for open-access journals is "an investment in a superior system of scholarly communication", as Peter Suber says and as I have argued previously. As more universities sign on to the compact, joined by funding agencies as well, fee-based open-access journals may become an increasingly viable alternative to subscription-based journals.

Full details about COPE are available at http://www.oacompact.org/.