Summary: Scholarly Publishing & Open Access within CUNY: One Faculty Looks at Changing the Paradigm, Summary of a Presentation by Philip Pecorino, Queensborough Community College, CUNY

Professor Philip Pecorino reports on what led him to embrace Open Access (OA) as a nxew paradigm for scholarly publication and describes his experiences bringing the topic of OA to the attention of CUNY colleagues. 

Recognizing that the Internet, like the printing press, is capable of transforming institutions, Pecorino saw that it would have a major impact on educational institutions, particularly higher education. In 2000, as he began setting up class sites for online instruction, he discovered that some individuals and institutions had provided the full text of books and articles free on the Web. He immediately saw the value of making such material available to anyone in the world with Internet access. 

When Pecorino became chairperson of CUNY's University Faculty Senate (UFS) Committee on Libraries and Information Technology a few years ago, he became aware that a major problem for academic libraries is the escalating costs of electronic databases. He and the Committee saw the alternative publishing
paradigm of OA as the solution to these rising costs. 

In the academic library community, OA had been endorsed by the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. CUNY's Council of Chief Librarians had also endorsed OA. Pecorino presented the OA concept to top CUNY administrators and the UFS Committee recommended that the CUNY Master Plan (2004-2008) drafters include the adoption of the OA paradigm. He believes that because of the Chief Librarians' endorsement of the concept, the plan did refer to an "initiative to establish regional archival repositories." 

Professor Pecorino is currently involved in efforts to create a mechanism for the self-archiving of CUNY faculty scholarship. He is also trying to get the support of the university to take measures to preserve selected CUNY electronic documents in a digital archive. 

Looking to the future, Pecorino anticipates that the CUNY administration will be far ahead of the CUNY faculty regarding the Open Access paradigm. Since it is in the Master Plan, he expects CUNY to partner with SUNY and others to provide for self-archiving. He believes that recognition of the value of self-archiving in the promotion and tenure review process would greatly support the adoption of such a protocol at CUNY.   

OA will affect the tenure and review process in that there will continue to be refereed journals and a critical review process for scholarship, but the process of review before publication will change. Books and textbooks as well as journal articles are likely to be delivered over the Internet. 

Pecorino believes that the concept of intellectual property will undergo fundamental changes. Although authors will continue to be credited with being the originators of works, they will no longer have any control over their dissemination. Governments expect that research they fund will be available to the public and the worldwide community which funds research in a more general sense will expect access to the results of this research.