In “North American Campus-Based Open Access Funds: A Five-Year Progress Report,” Greg Tananbaum reviews and provides a status update on the SPARC Campus-based Open Access Funds initiative. This initiative provides seed funding to libraries that authors can access as need be in order to publish open access. Tananbaum provides impressive statistics on the relative uptake of the initiative, including papers (3863) and unique authors (3121) funded to date. But he also outlines challenges that have arisen: namely, enticing and sustaining author engagement, and managing demand of OA funds that become highly coveted by among on-campus authors. (The latter seems like a positive problem to me, but challenges are challenges I guess.) Overall, Tananbaum presents a commendable portrayal of this SPARC initiative. As he states, because of the OA Funds, “Thousands of authors have published thousands of OA articles” (5). Further, Tananbaum claims that this positive status report bodes well for OA as a larger movement, as it could be interpreted as a microcosm of the growing support and prevalence of open access publication.

 

Work cited

Tananbaum, Greg. 2014. “North American Campus-Based Open Access Funds: A Five Year Progress Report.” http://www.sparc.arl.org/sites/default/files/OA%20Fund%205%20Year%20Review.pdf