Abstract
This article presents a range of perspectives on the current state of the scholarly communications sector through the lens of a research-informed university, beginning with a short overview of research at the University of Salford and followed by our assessment of what we feel is working, and indeed not working, with the current system. Based on this, we assess what we feel are the current barriers to change and both how these can be overcome and what we are doing to overcome them. Finally, we provide some commentary on what we feel is the changing open access paradigm and where all this should take us next.
Highlights
125-year history as an institution delivering technical education – the University of Salford has been immersed in research and its applications within industry
Salford’s research activity, profile and values shape how we work as a library to support research across the institution, and our perspectives on the current state of the scholarly communications system, in particular open access (OA)
Academic staff conduct and publish the outputs of their research, for which they and their universities are rewarded with professional esteem, future funding and citations which inform university rankings
Summary
125-year history as an institution delivering technical education – the University of Salford has been immersed in research and its applications within industry. On top of the millions in subscriptions fees, we pay millions in article processing charges (APCs).[2] Yet, still some publishers refuse us the right to share the ‘academic culture and academic progression still associate research products of our academic labour openly via our repositories and thereby excellence with the leave us non-compliant with the policies of the funders upon which the system relies These publisher policies can sometimes lessen the ability of universities to support the ultimate impact of research upon perceived prestige of a publisher’. This includes academic-led initiatives (e.g. the Open Library of Humanities [OLH], arXiv); university-led OA presses; a drive to retain authors’ copyright and enable reuse (the UK Scholarly Communications Licence); the responsible metrics movement; funders engaged and driving change (e.g. through Plan S in Europe) and, taking a different approach, SciELO in Latin America; and publishers themselves adopting fully OA models (e.g. PLOS, the Institute of Physics). Here, that the recent emergence of new ‘our individual transformative agreements, which have different financial implications for bargaining power may different types of institution, will require that we balance both institutional be constrained by our and national need
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