Virtually There: Open Access and the Online Growth of Pacific Dissertations and Theses

It has now been more than a decade since the Open Society Institute—the private grant-making foundation begun by George Soros—sponsored a multinational, multidisciplinary gathering in Hungary to, as the institute notes on its website, "accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet."¹ Though this event was hardly the first attempt at fostering free online access to scholarly information, the two-day gathering resulted in a position statement called the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which came to be seen as a foundational document for the open-access movement as we know it today. To somewhat oversimplify, the movement is a worldwide endeavor rooted in the idea that scholarly writing, produced by authors who have no expectation of payment for their work, should not become a commodity.

The BOAI was not merely an academic exercise, so to speak. Since the mid-1980s, institutional subscription rates for academic journals have risen at an annual rate that has far outpaced inflation. Between 1986 and 2001, when the Budapest meeting was convened, the annual median expenditure for serial publications by libraries in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) rose from $1,496,775 to $4,660,349. In 2009, that number stood at $7,193,291—a 381 percent increase since 1986 or, on average, 7.4 percent per year (Kyrillidou and Morris 2011, 10). Just to be clear, this median cost figure is based on what each individual ARL member library—of which there are 126 in North America and Hawai'i— pays each year. As one example, in 2010 the University of Hawai'i paid $6,512,647 for current serials, or roughly 37 percent of all library expenditures (Kyrillidou, Morris, and Roebuck 2011, 36).²

While these costs represent all serial expenditures in a given library (academic journals, newspapers, magazines, etc), the cost increases are largely driven by commercially published academic journals. In the world of academic libraries, this situation is often referred to as the "serials crisis" and is perhaps best summarized in a 2005 report by Judith M Panitch and Sarah Michalak, two librarians at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill:

While the publication of research results was once the purview of scholarly societies, the increased pace of research and concurrent proliferation of specializations that characterized the last thirty years invited the participation of commercial publishers in the review and dissemination of scholarly output. Yet the workings of the system have remained essentially the same: Faculty, supported by the University, produce research results which they then sign over freely to publishers in order to advance knowledge in their field and because most career paths require a distinguished publication record. Faculty members additionally volunteer their time to serve as editors and editorial board members. Commercial publishers find themselves in the enviable position of selling research which they neither produced nor paid for to a high-demand market. . . . It is hard to imagine an academic context in which research could advance or career decisions could be made without scholarly journals; they have acquired the status of a public good, a common currency of the university.

This then is the context out of which arose the BOAI, with the underlying goal being that, in the name of communication and continued innovation, scholarly work should be made universally available to those who seek it, with no (or as few as possible) barriers to access. "The only constraint on reproduction and distribution," according to the BOAI, "and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited" (Chan and others 2002). Further, the BOAI called for scholars to begin "self-archiving" their material online in open electronic archives and to found their own freely available electronic journals.

In the ensuing years, several other statements and declarations built on and refined the BOAI;³ these clarify, for instance, that open access does not require repealing (or violating) copyright law, but rather...