Strategies for Success: Open Access Policies at North American Educational Institutions

Abstract

© 2016 Christine Fruin and Shan Sutton, Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) CC BY-NC. Recognizing the paucity of quantitative and qualitative data from North American educational institutions that have pursued open access policies, the authors devised a survey to collect information on the characteristics of these institutions, as well as the elements of the open access policies, the methods of promoting these policies, faculty concerns about the policies, and how those concerns have been addressed. The data collected through survey results from fifty-one institutions can inform the strategic decisions being made by other institutions considering an open access policy and illustrates the essential roles that academic libraries can play in the development and passage of open access policies. he establishment of open access policies at North American universities and colleges can be traced back to 2008 when open access emerged as a viable topic of policy development. At that time, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) enacted a policy requiring all published research funded by the NIH to be available in the publicly accessible database PubMed within twelve months of commercial publication. 1 That same year, Harvard University's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences became the first North American institution to enact an open access policy, which granted Harvard a nonexclusive license to make the scholarly works of the faculty in that college available for noncommercial use through Harvard's institutional repository. 2 More recently, most of the major federal funding agencies impacted by the 2013 executive order by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directing the development of public access plans have adopted such plans. At the state government level, California, Illinois, and New York have proposed or enacted laws to ensure public access to publicly funded research. 3 Meanwhile, well over fifty educational institutions, including MIT, Duke University, and the University of California system, have enacted or are in the process of developing open access policies at institutional, college, and departmental levels. 4 To support these institutions, the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions was formed in 2011 to share information and illuminate opportunities for moving faculty-led open access policies forward at member institutions and advocate for open access nationally and internationally. 5 Further, the persons instrumental in drafting and implementing the Harvard open access policy have released a living

Institutional Repositories and Academic Social Networks: Competition or Complement? A Study of Open Access Policy Compliance vs. ResearchGate Participation

“…The policy applies to all URI faculty and stipulates that "each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the author's final version of each article no later than the date of its publication… to the University Libraries" and that the University Libraries may "make the article available to the public in an open-access repository" (University of Rhode Island Faculty Senate, 2013). While designed as a mandate, these types of OA policies are optional in practice due to the presence of a waiver provision and lack of any penalties for non-compliance (Anderson, 2016;Basken, 2016;Fruin & Sutton, 2016;Shieber, 2009;Smith, 2012; Suber, 2012;Zhang, Boock, & Wirth, 2015).At URI, faculty members are encouraged and expected to share the author manuscript version of their articles through the IR under the terms of the OA Policy. Unlike other institutions that have developed procedures to harvest articles from open sources and publishers by agreement (Duranceau & Kriegsman, 2013;Duranceau & Kriegsman, 2015;Fruin & Sutton, 2016;Kilcer, 2015;Kipphut-Smith, 2014a;Kipphut-Smith, 2014b;Smith, 2012), URI has implemented a mostly manual workflow that relies on active faculty participation.…”

“…While designed as a mandate, these types of OA policies are optional in practice due to the presence of a waiver provision and lack of any penalties for non-compliance (Anderson, 2016;Basken, 2016;Fruin & Sutton, 2016;Shieber, 2009;Smith, 2012; Suber, 2012;Zhang, Boock, & Wirth, 2015).…”

UK university policy approaches towards the copyright ownership of scholarly works and the future of open access

“…The principal concern is that, to allay academics' fears around the loss of academic freedom, they are given the right to opt out of the mandate on a case by case basis. A recent survey by Fruin and Sutton (2016) of US universities who had either 'enacted' an open access policy or had a policy 'in process' found that "most policies (86 percent in the Enacted Policy Group and 67 percent in the In Process Group) include language that grants automatic waivers to a faculty author on request without justification or explanation." These waivers may result in an embargo period being placed on the paper, or if the academic or publisher demands it, the paper not being made available at all.…”

“…However, individual academics would still have the right to opt-out of the licence if their publisher of choice does not accept the UK-SCL terms. This will need to be monitored if the UK is to avoid the situation facing the 70% of US universities who find themselves honouring publisher embargoes as a result of 87% of their policies allowing opt-outs (Fruin and Sutton, 2016). In such cases, academics may find themselves negotiating either with the publisher for a (reduced) embargo period, or with their institution to get a waiver.…”

“…This type of mandate is becoming the dominant form of open access policy in the USA (Fruin and Sutton, 2016) and is probably the closest the university community has come to the original proposal of the RoMEO project in that universities and their scholars act together to retain some rights over at least their research papers (Gadd et al, 2003). However, commentators have noted some problems with this approach.…”