Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity

With this week's focus on scholarly publishing and open-access publishing, it especially enlightening to examine recent efforts to foster and expand open-access journals. The Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity is one such effort. The compact is an agreement for colleges, universities, and other research institutions from around the world to sign, in which each institution "commits to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds."

This seems like a very obvious solution to the funding problems faced by open-access journals. Universities are already subsidizing the publication costs for articles written by their faculty by paying for subscriptions to closed-access journals, so in order to place both types of journals on level footing, the same institutions could also underwrite open-access journals.

The compact was originally suggested by Stuart Shieber, Welch Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and Faculty Director of Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication. He has been a vocal advocate for open-access publishing. Here is a video of him and Gary King, another Harvard professor, discussing open-access:

To date, twenty-one institutions are signatories of the compact. Although the University of Wisconsin-Madison has not signed it, the compact identifies UW-Madison as having "established open-access funds compatible with its underlying principles."