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Research is an essential part of education.
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Students are expected to cite articles from scholarly journals when they write research papers.
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You probably use journal articles in your own work.
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You've probably also encountered journal articles that you wanted to read but couldn't get access to.
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Why is that?
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Well, let's take a look at how scholarly journals are published today.
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Professor A does some research and writes an article about it for free.
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He wants to publish it so he submits it to a journal in his field.
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The journal likes his article so asks Professor B and C to peer review it.
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The professors read it, evaluate it and send it back for free.
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The journal sends Professor A the changes that need to be made, if any,
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and Professor A sends them the final version of his article at no cost to the journal.
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The publisher then puts Professor A's article with a bunch of other articles
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and formats them all together and then charges people for access.
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How much does it cost to a campus library to buy a subscription to the journal?
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It depends...
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If it is a journal of Econometrics,
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a year subscription costs as much as two thousand one hundred fifty-five dollars
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if it is the journal of Geophysical Research,
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it costs five thousand seven hundred and sixty dollars.
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if it is the journal of Brain Research,
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it's twenty-one thousand seven hundred forty-four dollars.
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not all scholarly journals cost this much
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but when many of the key resources for students and faculty cost an arm and a leg,
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not even the best funded university libraries can afford them all.
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So librarians buy what they can afford
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and students and the professors just have to hope
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they aren't missing something important.
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But it doesn't have to be this way
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There is an alternative to the closed subscription-based scholarly publishing model:
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Open Access
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Open Access is free, unrestricted online access to scholarly works.
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Open Access journals use advertising, sponsorship, author fees,
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and other sources of revenue to support the cost of publication, keeping access free to the user.
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Authors can choose to publish their articles in one of over forty-two hundred peer-reviewed Open Access Journals
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or they can put a copy of work published elsewhere in an online repository.
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Open Access lets anyone read the latest research.
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It helps scholars stay up-to-date on each other's work,
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it enables computers to sift text mining and mashups,
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which help uncover trends that no-one would have suspected
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it gives authors more visibility and impact,
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and it makes school work a lot easier.
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Open Access brings curious minds and the world's knowledge together.
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Isn't that what academia is fundamentally about?
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Free, unrestricted, online access
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Open Access