The Internet has brought unparalleled opportunities for expanding the availability of research by bringing down economic and physical barriers to sharing. The digitally networked environment can democratize access, accelerate discovery, encourage new interdisciplinary approaches to complex research challenges, and enable new research strategies.
To take advantage of these opportunities and to further their mission of creating, preserving, and disseminating knowledge, many academic institutions are taking steps to capture the benefits of Open Access by building digital repositories to distribute faculty scholarly articles and other research outputs. Individual authors have taken steps to retain the rights they need to allow their work to be made freely available via their institution’s repository. And, faculties at some institutions are increasingly adopting resolutions endorsing policies to encourage Open Access to scholarly articles.
If you're considering a campus open-access policy, please explore the resources available here and let us know how we might assist.
SPARC offers two types of resources to facilitate campus policy discussions based on the facts about Open Access, including the facts about copyright law and about the compatibility between Open Access and journal sustainability. First, please find below a guide to implementing a campus open-access policy; videos from the SPARC-ACRL forum on the Harvard policy; and background on the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences policy, the first in which U.S. faculty voted unanimously for Open Access to be made the default.
Also available by request are two documents drawn from the experiences of those who have successfully spearheaded efforts to gain adoption of an institutional open-access policy. These include: "Campus open-access policy 'Choice Points'," which touch on all available options in developing a policy, along with recommended steps; and "Responses to common misconceptions about campus open-access policies." Please contact SPARC, via Stacie Lemick at stacie [at] arl [dot] org, to request access to these documents.
SPARC also is pleased to coordinate the work of a group of expert advisers who have experience with the process of gaining faculty acceptance for a campus open-access policy and who stand by to answer questions that remain after you have examined these tools. Please contact SPARC, via Heather Joseph at heather [at] arl [dot] org, to be put in touch with the advisory group.