<i>College & Research Libraries</i> Goes Fully Open Access

Last year, in the July issue of this journal, I wrote an editorial entitled " Walk the Talk: Open Access and Academic Libraries " in which I commented on some of the recent research we had published on the topic of open access practices in the literature of librarianship. Not all the findings were encouraging, and I urged our profession to better " walk the talk " of open access in our own scholarly practices. I described our journal, College & Research Libraries, as good but not perfect when it came to open access. Lo and behold, the editorial had an effect, for starting next issue, College & Research Libraries will lift its six-month embargo on recently published online articles and become a fully open access journal. This is a real step forward in practice and in setting an example of the value of open access in scholarly communications. I would like to give all the credit to my editorial persuasiveness, but in reality the move to full open access took the time and effort of many advocates in the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), which is also the publisher of this journal. It was interesting being caught in the middle of this discussion and debate about going open access, with concerns about the hard reality of economic viability weighing in against the growing acceptance of open access to scholarship as a high professional value. With paid subscribers and advertisers in slow but steady decline (a common situation for many scholarly journals), would open access exacerbate these negative financial trends for College & Research Libraries? Why pay for a journal when you can get it free online? These hard questions made me more sympathetic to the difficult decisions editors, publishers, scholarly societies, and professional asso-College & Research Libraries Goes Fully Open Access ciations in many disciplines must face when considering open access for their publications. In spite of economic uncertainty, I am pleased that ACRL has endorsed full open access in practice for its primary research journal. The intellectual value of open access, I believe, justifies its cost. Now the content of our journal will be freely available online to all around the world. Those of us involved in the production of College & Research Libraries applaud its move to open access, but we are well aware of the financial challenges we face with our scholarly journal. Even …