It’s difficult to express how incredible the response to my Personal Open Access plan has been. Thank you everyone for your tweets, retweets, emails, and encouragement.

While the current movements online have been influential, my frustration with closed access publishing has been stewing for a while.  Coming into a tenure track position, I was frustrated by my perception that the preferred way to obtain tenure was in closed journals that felt completely inaccessible to those without massive institutional subscriptions, which included “former me” as a children’s librarian. Among my network of professional colleagues, the articles we shared the most were the ones where a log in wasn’t required to access it.  Over the past year, I’ve been pleased to see the number of opportunities including the Journal of the Medical Library Association, Collaborative Librarianship, and last week’s launch of the Journal of eScience Librarianship. With these and other Green and Gold OA options available, I see many opportunities.

Part of getting tenure in an Open Access world, an Open Science world, is an open lab notebook. Starting Tuesday, I’ll do my best to give you a weekly update.  Next week, I’ll outline requirements that I’m facing and then I can start addressing what I’ve done and what I’m doing. This is going to be a marathon, not a sprint, and my department head has frequently reminded me that I need to be keeping track of what I’m doing. So I’ll do that here in my public facing space.

Thank you specifically to Barbara Fister, who has  a list of a few others who are taking on OA Tenure and my sincere appreciation to the 11 Provosts of Research Universities who stated yesterday in their Values and Scholarship letter that a local goal was

“Ensuring that promotion and tenure review are flexible enough to recognize and reward new modes of communicating research outcomes.”