2017 Charleston Library Conference

Even though open access is now a shared vision of the world’s academic communities, research councils, and funding bodies, only 14% of the world’s scholarly journals are available open access on publication, and the bulk of the leading scientific journals remain locked behind paywalls. New Open Access publishing initiatives have produced laudable results, but are not enough to liberate scholarly communications from the confines of an antiquated, print-based publishing system and the grip of hybrid costs and increasing subscription costs.
Based on data analyses conducted by the Max Planck Digital Library and described in their widely-read White Paper, a rapid transformation of the subscription system is possible and librarians have a leading role to play.

In this session, two librarians will present their strategies to propel open access forward, enabling the transformation of today’s corpus of scholarly journals from subscription to open access.