With the ongoing government shutdown, federally operated websites and databases are being turned off, such as NASA’s website, or not updated with current information like the National Institutes of Health PubMed Central’s website. Access to information paid for by taxpayer dollars is inaccessible to the taxpayer, but government shutdowns are not the only way that information becomes unavailable. Back in the spring of 2013, NASA’s technical reports server was down for several weeks while NASA assessed its internal security systems. Thousands and thousands of publicly accessible works covering over 50 years of NASA research were offline. In January of 2012, the government lost funding for the federal program National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII), and over ten years of data and research was no longer hosted by government servers, and much of it did not find a home elsewhere.

Nongovernmental options can be equally tenuous. Much of scientific publishing, whether federally funded or not, is done through commercial or professional societies. Typically, access to this research is paid for by membership fees, or through libraries paying thousands of dollars in subscription fees, or through individual pay as you go fees. Whichever the method, without some sort of paid access, you are unable to get to the published paper.

With such uncertainty in scientific publishing, an author could be forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t matter whether research is published open access or not, but this would be a mistake. If an author made every effort to maintain the copyright of his/her work, it would not tie down the work to a specific digital home. PubMed Central does a great job of providing access to federally funded medical research, but often the copyrights of those articles remain with the journal publisher. If the government shuts down PubMed Central completely, the journal publisher is the only avenue to the publication, usually through a subscription or a fee.

Likewise, commercial publishers and societies could fail without warning, leaving the digital distribution status of all the research to which they own copyright in limbo.

Georgia Tech faculty recognized the conundrums posed by scholarly publishing last year when it passed the institute’s Open Access Policy (effective Jan 2013). A crucial point in this policy is that it asks that Georgia Tech faculty authors retain the copyright to their research publications. When authors retain the copyright, they retain control of dissemination of their research. Publish in a commercial, peer-reviewed journal? Sure. Put a copy in a federal repository? That’ll be fine. Put it on your personal website? Go ahead. Put a copy in SMARTech, Georgia Tech’s institutional repository? You’re at Georgia Tech, you can do that.

In the library profession, one often hears the acronym LOCKSS – “Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe”. When the author retains copyrights to published research, lots of digital copies can be disseminated and archived in any way the author sees fit.

The week of Oct 21-25, Georgia Tech will host several events to coincide with Open Access Week, and discussing issues with openness in scientific research, and faculty perspectives of Open Access.

Join us to find out more about these important issues at the Georgia Tech Open Access website.