For Academic Publishing, Princeton Goes Open Access By Default

First time accepted submitter crazyvas writes "Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers (except if a waiver is requested). The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication. Universities pay millions of dollars a year for academic journal subscriptions. People without subscriptions are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research. This is a bold first step in changing the face of how research (especially when taxpayer funded) works in the country, and a step towards weakening the current culture of charging increasingly exorbitant prices to view academic research publications."

It's not a first step

[shoppa]

The first internet-age era step was (at least in physics publishing) 20 years ago: the LANL Preprint Archive, later known as xxx.lanl.gov, now www.arxiv.org
Previous to that there were paper preprints mailed out for decades and decades.
Now other fields have indeed have a harder time getting out from under the thumb of the publishing houses and will indeed need the kick in the rear that Princeton is giving.
That doesn't mean that refereed journals are going away - just that they are not the bleeding edge anymore, I would argue they never were.

This is really good stuff

[Baldrake]

Private academic publishers do extremely little for the exclusive copyright that they demand. Academics write the papers. Other academics peer-review them. Academics volunteer as editors and publicists. In most cases, none of these people are paid by the publisher for their work.

Increasingly, academic publications are digital only, meaning that literally the only service being provided by the publishers is to put the papers on a web site, behind a paywall.

Many academics that I know engage in "civil disobediance" and post their papers publicly anyway. Some publishers (notably the ACM) actually permit this. But most do not.

Princeton on its own won't be enough to change the system, but hopefully a few other big names will follow, and tip the balance.