From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 11:34:17 +0000

A new Q&A in a series exploring the current state of Open Access has
been published. This one is with Ann Okerson, Senior Advisor on
Electronic Strategies for the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), and
a former Associate University Librarian at Yale University. Okerson
also serves as a consultant on library projects, and moderates this
mailing list.

Prior to joining Yale, Okerson worked as founding senior program
officer for scholarly communications at the Association of Research
Libraries (ARL) in Washington, DC, after having written the consultant
report “Of Making Many Books There is No End: Report on Serial
Prices”. Published in 1989, this was one of the early rallying cries
to libraries and academia about the spiralling costs of scientific
journals.

After arriving at Yale, in 1996, Okerson organised the Northeast
Research Libraries Consortium (NERL), a group of 28 large research
libraries (and over 80 smaller affiliates) that negotiates licences
for electronic information (i.e. “big deals”) and engages in other
forms of cooperative activity.

In 1997, with funding from the Council on Library and Information
Resources (CLIR), Okerson and colleagues at Yale library mounted an
online educational resource covering the topic of library licensing of
electronic content, in a project called LIBLICENSE. In addition to web
resources and tools, this includes liblicense-l, which today has over
4,200 subscribers, including librarians, publishers and attorneys.

..

Okerson has been both a participant in and observer of the OA movement
since the beginning. In 1995, for instance, she co-edited — with
classicist Jim O’Donnell — the book “Scholarly Journals at the
Crossroads: a Subversive Proposal for Electronic Journal Publishing”.
This consists almost entirely of e-mail messages, and covers an
extensive multinational Internet discussion about the future of
scholarly journals that took place across many e-lists. The debate was
sparked by an online message that OA advocate Steven Harnad
(interviewed earlier in this Q&A series) had posted in 1994 under the
title “subversive proposal”.

Harnad’s message is now viewed as one of the seminal texts of the OA
movement, although it (and the book it led to) was published before
the various strands of the movement had coalesced into a single effort
(and adopted the name “open access”) — which happened in 2001 at the
Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).

Today Okerson is a member of the international steering committee for
SCOAP3, a project designed to transition the principle scientific
journals in the field of high energy physics to an OA business model.
SCOAP3 is set to go live in January 2014.

Given her background, Okerson is well placed to give an informed view
on the current state of Open Access. Inevitably, she views matters
through the eyes of a librarian.

More here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/ann-okerson-on-state-of-open-access.html