Open Access and the Vision of Voices
The Vision of Voices
The Voices vision is 10 years of age. The idea of a free international and electronic journal and forum for music therapy was first discussed at the Ninth World Congress on Music Therapy in Washington, in November 1999. One and a half years later, Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy was launched at the Fifth European Music Therapy Congress in Naples. In the very first issue of the journal, we communicated our goal and vision in the following way:
Our main goal is to establish an arena for dialogue, and we want this arena to be accessible for everybody worldwide. This is why Voices is offered free of charge to individuals, libraries and academic and commercial organizations. ...
The electronic format allows for texts within several genres and styles and also for experimentation with use of new technology for documentation and communication of music therapy. We will explore the hypertext and hypermedia possibilities that the Internet as a medium offers to enhance communication and understanding of a field that is too complex and multidimensional to be treated appropriately in traditional linear texts (Kenny & Stige, 2001).
The vision statement of the journal communicates similar ideas, and stresses the value of international discussion and dialogue in a free first class online forum: "This publication will encourage participation from every continent and will nurture the development of music therapy practice, theory, discussion and debate. Because culture has an important role in music and music therapy, we will encourage contributions that find their source in the cultural influences of each continental region" (Voices Vision Statement).
After 10 years work, we feel that this vision is as valid and important as ever. One of the things that we can see much clearer today, compared to when we started, is that Voices is part of an international movement of Open Access publishing. I will use this occasion to reflect briefly upon some values, promises, and challenges of Open Access.
What is Open Access and What are the Benefits?
Open Access is a term used internationally for free, immediate, and permanent access to full text versions of research articles and other scholarly work. Open Access means online access, for everybody linked to the Internet. There are two forms of Open Access publishing, sometimes called Green and Gold Open Access. Green Open Access involves self-archiving, where authors provide open access to articles that they have published elsewhere by submitting them to open archives, such as the open electronic archives of universities. Gold Open Access means that the journals themselves provide open access to their articles, either by charging authors or institutions for publishing articles or by simply making their electronic editions free for everybody. Voices belongs to the latter category of journals.
Both forms of Open Access publishing have been met with increasing interest by universities and other institutions supporting research and scholarly development. Progress in scholarly work depends upon access to the work of others. It could be said that Open Access publishing currently is the most explicit expression of one of the central values of research and scholarly work, namely communalism, the idea that knowledge should not be treated as private property but shared and made accessible for others (Merton, 1942/1973; Ziman, 2000). Open Access makes a broader range of ideas accessible to a broader audience. This is important for the scholars producing the work, for students learning their discipline, for a broader audience (including clients of course), and for society as a whole. It is important for the universities too, as demonstrated by the fact that five major American universities – Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and University of California at Berkeley – have signed on to a compact for Open Access publishing equity, where they recognize the desirability of Open Access to the scholarly literature and the need for stable sources of funding for publishers who choose to provide Open Access to their journalsÂ’ contents (Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity).
The financial predicament of university libraries is part of the backdrop here. The large international publishing companies have been increased the prices of their scholarly journals to a considerable degree the last few decades, with the result that access to scholarly articles has become an increasing challenge for some researchers and universities. The most recent economic downturn has of course not made this problem less acute, and Open Access scholarly journals have arisen as an important alternative to traditional subscription scholarly journals.
Building Resources and Realizing Possibilities
Another dimension to Open Access publication is that the medium that made Open Access possible, the Internet, also provides quite different possibilities than the paper format for a discipline such as music therapy, where audio and video documentation can be so important. We are probably only in the beginning phase of realizing and using all the possibilities created by Open Access publishing. Some scholars talk about the revolutionary possibilities that computing holds for scholarship. How many of us have explored those possibilities in any depth? (see e.g. Ginsparg, 2008).
In collaboration with other scholars and journals we may start to realize more of the possibilities. Voices is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, together with almost 4500 other academic journals worldwide. Of the 31 music journals in this directory, Voices is currently the only music therapy journal, but there are interesting journals in several sister disciplines, such as for instance Music and Arts in Action, Journal of Music and Meaning, International Journal of Community Music, and Critical Studies in Improvisation.
Challenges
The promises and possibilities notwithstanding, there are some concrete challenges for Voices as an Open Access journal that we want to work with in the months and years to come:
First, we have recently introduced the use of OJS (the Open Journal System) for submission of articles. OJS is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) through its federally funded efforts with the purpose of expanding and improving access to research internationally (PKP is an iniative iniatially funded by the Canadian Governement through the Office of Learning Technologies, Social Development Canada, Ottawa and further developed through the collaboration of several agancies). We must admit that in the first weeks and months of use, the OJS has given us some technical and practical challenges that we have not solved satisfactorily yet. We are working hard to resolve these problems, however, and do hope and think that in the long run OJS will help us in realizing our vision.
Second, do we "live on the web" and use the technological possibilities to the degree that would be optimal for a discipline such as music therapy? It is quite possible that future volumes of Voices will include more use of video and audio components than what is currently typical for our journal.
Third, Open Access and the use of audio and video documentation cannot resolve the challenge of language. Our language policy says that for the sake of international communication, we have chosen to use English as the primary language for Voices. However, our policy is also to increase the variety of languages presented over time. We have not been able to go very far in this direction, mostly because of lack of resources.
This brings us to the fourth challenge; Voices is currently not where the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity suggests that publishers of Open Access Journals should be: We do not have stable sources of funding. Thanks to generous support from the GC Rieber Foundations, we do have funding for 2010 and 2011 and part of 2012, but we need to develop models that can ensure long term stability for our forum.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Managing Editor Rune Rolvsjord and Co-Editor-in-Chief Carolyn Kenny, who have worked so hard during these ten years to realize the Voices vision.
References
Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity. Signed by Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and University of California at Berkeley. Retrieved October 29, 2009, fromFeil! Hyperkoblingsreferansen er ugyldig. http://www.oacompact.org/
Directory of Open Access Journals. Retrieved October 29, 2009, from http://www.doaj.org/
Ginsparg, Paul (2008). The Global Village Pioneers, Learned Publishing, 21, 95-100.
Kenny, Carolyn & Brynjulf Stige (2001). How to use your Voice: A Brief Guide to Readers and Future Authors. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 1(1). Retrieved October 29, 2009, from http://www.voices.no/mainissues/mitext11kennysstigeb.html
Merton, Robert K. (1942/1973). The Normative Structure of Science. In: Merton, Robert K. The Sociology of Science. Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Voices Vision Statement. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. Retrieved October 29, 2009, from http://www.voices.no/info/info1.html#Vision
Ziman, John (2000). Real Science. What it is, and What it Means. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
