Open Access Practices and Policies at the University and Beyond
An open access policy is a formal policy adopted by an institution to support researchers in making their work openly available. These policies can refer to published peer-reviewed articles, conference papers, and peer-reviewed drafts or pre-printed publications that are deposited in an institutional repository or published under open-access terms in a journal. Open access policies generally define the guidelines for how researchers can disseminate their research in order to maximize access to them. The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP; https://roarmap.eprints.org) is a registry that charts the open access policies or mandates adopted by universities, research institutions, and research funders that require or request their researchers to provide open access to their peer-reviewed research article output by depositing it in an institutional repository, or publish their research under open-access terms in a journal.
According to Peter Suber, an open access advocate, mandate is not the best word “‘for open-access policies,’ … but neither is any other English word.”[1] Without a mandate, institutions can consider faculty opt-in policies, whereby libraries or copyright offices focus on shifting the default publishing practice to open access.
UNIVERSITY POLICIES
Many universities have adopted open access policies that require university-affiliated researchers to grant to their institution a non-exclusive license to a scholarly article at the time of the creation of the work. This process heads off problems with publishers downstream, since the university retains a legal right to the work before copyright is transferred to a publisher. These policies have proliferated under the assumption that universities themselves should be able to access and preserve the research outputs of their faculty. To view an example, review the University of California Open Access Policy at https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-policy/. You can also view many other institutions’ open-access policies on the ROARMAP site (https://roarmap.eprints.org), which has collected several hundred of these policies, including those of universities, colleges, research organizations, and other academic institutions.
For academic librarians who are interested in developing an open access policy for their university or institution, the Harvard Open Access Project has
NOTE
- ↑ “Open-access Mandate,” Wikipedia, last edited March 22, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_mandate.
