[GOAL] Ann Okerson on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

[Richard Poynder]

A new Q&A in a series exploring the current state of Open Access has been
published. This one is with Ann Okerson, Senior Advisor on Electronic
Strategies for the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), and a former
Associate University Librarian at Yale University. Okerson also serves as a
consultant on library projects.

 

Prior to joining Yale, Okerson worked as founding senior program officer for
scholarly communications at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in
Washington, DC, after having written the consultant report "Of Making Many
Books There is No End: Report on Serial Prices". Published in 1989, this was
one of the early rallying cries to libraries and academia about the
spiralling costs of scientific journals.

 

After arriving at Yale, in 1996, Okerson organised the Northeast Research
Libraries Consortium (NERL), a group of 28 large research libraries (and
over 80 smaller affiliates) that negotiates licences for electronic
information (i.e. "big deals") and engages in other forms of cooperative
activity.

 

In 1997, with funding from the Council on Library and Information Resources
(CLIR), Okerson and colleagues at Yale library mounted an online educational
resource covering the topic of library licensing of electronic content, in a
project called LIBLICENSE. In addition to web resources and tools, this
includes the influential mailing list liblicense-l, which today has over
4,200 subscribers, including librarians, publishers and attorneys.

 

..

 

Okerson has been both a participant in and observer of the OA movement since
the beginning. In 1995, for instance, she co-edited - with classicist Jim
O'Donnell - the book "Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: a Subversive
Proposal for Electronic Journal Publishing". This consists almost entirely
of e-mail messages, and covers an extensive multinational Internet
discussion about the future of scholarly journals that took place across
many e-lists. The debate was sparked by an online message that OA advocate
Steven Harnad (interviewed earlier in this Q&A series) had posted in 1994
under the title "subversive proposal". 

 

Harnad's message is now viewed as one of the seminal texts of the OA
movement, although it (and the book it led to) was published before the
various strands of the movement had coalesced into a single effort (and
adopted the name "open access") - which happened in 2001 at the Budapest
Open Access Initiative (BOAI). 

 

Today Okerson is a member of the international steering committee for
SCOAP3, a project designed to transition the principle scientific journals
in the field of high energy physics to an OA business model. SCOAP3 is set
to go live in January 2014. 

 

Given her background, Okerson is well placed to give an informed view on the
current state of Open Access. Inevitably, she views matters through the eyes
of a librarian.

 

More here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/ann-okerson-on-state-of-open-access.ht
ml

 

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