Expanding Public Access to University Research Results: Can the Academic Community Agree on a Common Path Forward?

John Vaughn
Executive Vice President, Association of American Universities
Play (63min) Download: MP4 | MP3

The rapid development of digital communications capabilities provides the potential for both beneficial and harmful changes to scholarly publishing. The stakeholders in the scholarly publishing community are differentially affected by these digital capacities. Unfortunately, an internecine ideological battle within the academic community over the how it should respond to the opportunities and challenges confronting scholarly publishing impedes a collegial effort to chart a balanced course forward through compromise and collaboration, with enhanced support of scholarship as the principal beneficiary. This talk will focus on the work of the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, a group of publishers, librarians, academic administrators, and scholars convened by the chairman of the US House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee to seek a consensus set of recommendations to expand access to scholarly publishing while preserving the critical components of the enterprise, principally its quality and sustainability.