Points of View

"The free flow of information is core to our institutional mission and critical for the advancement of knowledge. Universities have a responsibility to ensure sustained access to the knowledge created within the academy, and the Digital Conservancy offers the University of Minnesota community an opportunity to provide both open access to and preservation of our faculty’s work."

"It's important for authors to be able to self-archive our works, both on our own web sites and with the University Digital Conservancy. As a land-grant university, it is part of our mission to provide broad access to higher education, and its fruits, to all of society. We can also work with our professional associations to ensure that scholars retain the rights they need."

"It is critical that published scientific articles resulting from work we do in health and biomedical research are made available to the public as quickly as possible to speed the application of our discoveries into knowledge. Open Access repositories such as the University Digital Conservancy are an important part of this process."

"For people working in the humanities, the cost of a journal might not necessarily be a reason to promote open access. However, a freely accessible online medium does open up a creative space where new forms of collaboration are possible. As someone who concentrates on collective writing in contemporary Europe, literary publications shared through open access are an exciting new genre of primary texts."

"It's difficult to serve as an editor for a journal when the publisher's interests are not always the interests of my field. This is one reason that I've moved to a new journal run by mathematicians for mathematicians."

"Our authors have rights to reproduce their articles in print or other media and place the articles in a digital repository or archive of their institution. In addition, the authors may authorize others to exercise any of these rights. We feel expanded ownership of their published work promotes author confidence in the journal and facilitates free and timely dissemination of new scientific information."

"Open access matters to me because it will be one of the pillars of the new world of the 21st century. In former times of inexpensive publishing, in a highly classist society with limited literacy, a lot of publishing functioned like Open Access: All who wanted to and were able to read in a given field could find what they needed and afford it. Not any more. The conjuncture of exorbitant publishing costs, the global scale of information exchange, and the virtual worship of corporate capitalistic models has shut down effective information flow between scholarly areas and the broader public. Also, institutions of learning can now be ranked by those with better access vs. those with poor access. Open Access publishing has the potential to fix these growing inequities quickly and efficaciously."