The Crisis in Scholarly Communication

What you can do

Here’s what faculty, staff, and students can do to help secure the future of scholarly publication by supporting the open access movement.


  1. Learn about the situation in scholarly communication and the open access alternative. Read the material in the various web resources listed on this site.

  2. Wherever possible, submit your own research to an open access journal and self archive it in an institutional repository or subject archive.  UNM faculty, staff, and students may now submit scholarly materials to UNM's own institutional repository, DSpaceUNM.  For more information on DSpaceUNM see https://repository.unm.edu.

  3. Faculty members should lobby their departments and deans to revise tenure and promotion standards to reward publication in open access journals and self-archiving in institutional repositories or subject archives.

  4. In their capacity as mentors to graduate and professional students, faculty should encourage students to become aware of the open access movement and to support it. Faculty should encourage their departments to - integrate open access publication and self-archiving into the training of graduate and professional students.

  5. Researchers, staff, and students at academic and research organizations should sign their names to petitions and declarations supporting the open access movement, such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.soros.org/openaccess) and the Open Letter of the Public Library of Science (http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml).

  6. Researchers who choose to publish in non-open access journals should refrain from transferring copyright to the publisher. Instead, the researcher should offer the publisher the right of first publication in print and electronic form.

  7. Researchers should encourage the professional societies to which they belong to support the open access movement. They should speak out at meetings of committees and governing boards, lobbying for official policies supportive of open access.

  8. Researchers should submit pro-open access letters and opinion pieces to journals and magazines in their field.