PDF for Printing - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences - Columbia ...

Supporters of open access cite a number of reasons why making work digitallyavailable is beneficial to scholars. Among these are the increase in readershipand in potential citations in other scholars’ research.Traditionally, students completing a Ph.D. degree havebeen required to produce a dissertation that contributesto academic knowledge, and which is made accessible forother scholars to build upon. Before the advent of onlineinformation resources, this public access was achievedthrough bound copies of dissertations made availablethrough university libraries and interlibrary loan, as wellas through microfilm copies accessible through the UMIdissertation abstracts index. Space constraints on libraryshelves, however, forced many universities includingColumbia to store dissertations off-site, where the likelihoodof these volumes being read or cited remained low. Ifthe doctoral dissertation is truly meant to be an open contributionto academic knowledge, the Internet has proven tobe the best vehicle to enable it.An open-access work is one that is digital, availableonline, and free of price barriers such as subscriptionsor licensing fees. Making a work available through openaccess does not require an author to give up copyright onthe work, although some authors do choose to release theirwork without copyright or use a Creative Commons licensethat permits a work to be redistributed, remixed, or builtupon to an extent determined by its author. Early movementsto harness the Internet for open-access archiving ofacademic work led to a series of meetings that took placein Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin in 2002 and 2003. Theresult of these meetings was a commonly accepted definitionfor open-access content that emphasized freedom fromprice barriers in accessing information and the availabilityof works to all legitimate scholarly uses. In the years sincethese meetings, an increasing number of universities,research institutions, and publishers have embraced whathas come to be called the “BBB definition”—named for thethree cities—in providing open-access services.Supporters of open access cite a number of reasons whymaking work digitally available is beneficial to scholars.Among these are the increase in readership and in potentialcitations in other scholars’ research. According to the OpenAccess Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS), studieshave demonstrated the positive impact that open accesshas on the dissemination of research, including substantialincreases in readership and citations as well as increasedaccess to scholarly work for universities in developing nationswhose budgets do not allow for institutional subscriptionsto traditional journals and databases. At Columbia,another benefit to students completing the dissertation isthe permanent URL assigned to every work made availablein Academic Commons, which enables an always-valid linkto be included in CVs and citations.One concern among doctoral students, particularlythose in the humanities, is that open access may interferewith the future publication of a book based on the dissertation.While opinions on this vary from editor to editor, it iscommonly understood that a book manuscript should bea very different document from a dissertation. The onlinearchiving of a dissertation is unlikely to interfere with thepublication of a book. Professor Stuart M. Shieber, Directorof the Office for Scholarly Communication at HarvardLink back to contents page10 Superscript