First Public University Adopts Open Access Policy

Journal articles by professors at the University of Kansas (US) will soon be freely available online, the school reported, as it becomes the first public university in the United States to embrace an “open access” policy.

The university joins ranks with Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University, which have similar policies. The University of Kansas’s announcement may be significant as it is often argued that publicly-supported research should be freely available to the public.

“Academic publishing has become increasingly commercial and unavailable to other scholars, or to the general public, in recent years,” Townsend Peterson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, said in the press release. This move will “represents a first step towards a new means of scholarly communication, in which the entire global academic community has access to the totality of scholarship,” he added.

Thanks to Thomas Hammond of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation for the tip.