Open Access at Indiana University Bloomington | Shreds and Patches

In April 2014, the Indiana University, Bloomington, Faculty Council Library recommended against moving forward with an OA policy. 

“[However], the Library Committee of the Indianapolis Faculty Council at IUPUI has recommended such a policy to its full campus council and the leadership groups on both campus intend to pursue educational and policy setting efforts around open access at the level of the university as a whole under the auspices of the University Faculty Council. Those watching open access policy work in Bloomington then should know that discussions on the issues are not concluded, despite the majority report of the Library Committee….

[At Bloomington] factors motivating member reservations about a campus open access policy defy categorization and are sometimes contradictory. A highly abstract summation of them is concern that such a policy could have various unintended negative consequences either as an outgrowth of achieving the stated goals of such a policy or in failing to do so.”

Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness – ePrints Soton

Abstract:  The PASTEUR4OA project analyses what makes an Open Access (OA) policy effective. The total number of institutional or funder OA policies worldwide is now 663 (March 2015), over half of them mandatory. ROARMAP, the policy registry, has been rebuilt to record more policy detail and provide more extensive search functionality. Deposit rates were measured for articles in institutions’ repositories and compared to the total number of WoS-indexed articles published from those institutions. Average deposit rate was over four times as high for institutions with a mandatory policy. Six positive correlations were found between deposit rates and (1) Must-Deposit; (2) Cannot-Waive-Deposit; (3) Deposit-Linked-to-Research-Evaluation; (4) Cannot-Waive-Rights-Retention; (5) Must-Make-Deposit-OA (after allowable embargo) and (6) Can-Waive-OA. For deposit latency, there is a positive correlation between earlier deposit and (7) Must-Deposit-Immediately as well as with (4) Cannot-Waive-Rights-Retention and with mandate age. There are not yet enough OA policies to test whether still further policy conditions would contribute to mandate effectiveness but the present findings already suggest that it would be useful for current and future OA policies to adopt the seven positive conditions so as to accelerate and maximise the growth of OA.

Increasing Participation in Your Institutional Repository

“So you’ve established an institutional repository (IR), where users can put papers, theses, and experimental data on file, making it easily accessible to the larger world. While getting an institutional repository up and running is no small feat, it’s only the first step. To make the most of this tool, you have to fill it, and that means getting ongoing participation from faculty and students.

While making information as broadly accessible as possible is a high priority for most librarians, the same can’t necessarily be said for all the faculty members producing that information. To drive participation by potential contributors, librarians have to show students and faculty what’s in it for them in addition to making a principled appeal. One way of doing that is helping to tie participation to things that already matter to academics, like tracking (and increasing) citations and other proof of usage of their work….”

How EIFL’s support helped open up East African research to the world | EIFL

“When EIFL organized the first-ever workshop on open access in Kenya in 2010, there were just seven institutional open access repositories in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Awareness about OA was limited, and very few universities had open access policies.

Seven years later, in 2017, over 50 new repositories had been set up and 33 institutions had adopted open access policies. There were almost 200,000 documents available in the repositories, and download numbers had run into the millions.

This two-page case study tells how EIFL, in collaboration with our partner library consortia, the Kenya Libraries and Information Services Consortium (KLISC), the Consortium of Tanzania Universities and Research Libraries (COTUL) and the Consortium of Uganda University Libraries (CUUL), helped open up East African research to the world….”

» A proposal to simplify the University of North Texas open-access policy The Occasional Pamphlet

“The University of North Texas is engaged in a laudable process of designing an open-access policy for their community. Draft language for their policy is now available at their site on open access; the most recent version is as of June 7.

They are pursuing a Harnad-style ID/OA policy, requiring deposit of articles but pursuing distribution only to the extent that publishers’ agreements allow. Although I prefer a Harvard-style approach, this is also quite a good and reasonable approach. I have some concerns though about the details of the UNT working out of the policy. In particular, they have incorporated into the statement of the policy some language from the Harvard-style policies, which doesn’t sit comfortably with the basic approach they have taken. Below, I argue that the intention of their policy can be more consistently specified, and in the process greatly simplified….”

Closing the divide: Subject librarians and scholarly communication librarians can work together to reach common goals | Middleton | College & Research Libraries News

“My thinking has been heavily influenced by Karen Williams, former associate university librarian for academic programs at the University of Minnesota Libraries (UML) and her work to incorporate scholarly communication into the workflow of subject librarians/liaisons. In 2010, Kara Malenfant, ACRL senior strategist for special initiatives, detailed the collaboration and systems thinking approach that UML used to define and identify a baseline expertise in scholarly communication for their liaison librarians.4 Successful strategies that UML deployed included an investment in training and professional development that centered on scholarly communication for their liaisons, documenting expectations related to scholarly communication in position descriptions, creating annual goals per the expectations, and assessing how well liaison librarians were meeting the goals related to scholarly communication.

Williams expanded on her work at UML in an Association of Research Libraries (ARL) report that outlined emerging trends and new roles for liaison librarians.5 In this report, she and coauthor Janice Jaguszewski conducted a series of interviews with administrators at five ARL libraries. Using information gathered from the interviews, the authors identified six trends impacting liaison librarian roles at their institution. Among the six trends, the third trend discussed the intersections of copyright, intellectual property, and scholarly communication and the potential for subject/liaison librarians to partner and effectively participate in these activities serving as educators, consultants, and advocates….”

Association of Universities in the Netherlands launches 2018-2020 Road Map to Open Access

100% open-access publication by 2020: that ambition is stated by the National Plan Open Science and the goal to which the VSNU has committed its efforts. The VSNU E-zine on open access published today includes the plans made by the universities in order to achieve this goal. 

OSF | Public Access Submission System (PASS)

“The Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University, the Center for Open Science, MIT Libraries and the Harvard University Office for Scholarly Communication are building the Public Access Submission System (PASS), an open platform that would support researchers’ workflows related to compliance with funding agencies’ public access policies. The main ideas for this project arose based on discussions between Harvard, MIT and COS over the last two years….

While many federal agencies require research results to be made publicly accessible, the processes and requirements to do so vary greatly from one agency to another. The heterogeneous processes and requirements have become burdensome for researchers and their institutions, resulting in lower rates of compliances or compliance efficacies. Federal agencies, however, are not in a position to develop and commit to a solution, which would harmonize these workflows.

On the university side, many researchers are subject to more than one OA policy, for example, a university policy and a funder policy. Similarly, in the case of researches with multiple funding sources, researchers are subjects to public access policies from different funders. Universities would face an implementation nightmare, if the only paths to compliance were the different submission interfaces at different funders and institutions,. A unified submission interface would lighten the load on universities, and improve compliance, even if the unified submission interface were not exclusive….”

Copyright and the Harvard Open Access Mandate by Eric Priest :: SSRN

Abstract:  Open access proponents argue that scholars are far more likely to make their articles freely available online if they are required to do so by their university or funding institution. Therefore, if the open access movement is to achieve anything close to its goal of seeing all scholarly articles freely available online, mandates will likely play a significant role. In 2008, the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy that purports not only to require scholars to deposit their works in open access repositories, but also to grant the university nonexclusive copyright licenses to archive and publicly distribute all faculty-produced scholarly articles. A number of other American universities have since adopted similar policies. The principal aim of this Article is to analyze the legal effect of these Harvard-style open access “permission” mandates.

 

By invoking copyright law terminology in permission mandates, schools might intend that they have the legal effect of transferring nonexclusive rights to the school, thereby clarifying and fortifying the school’s rights to reproduce and publicly disseminate faculty works. However, the legal effect of these mandates is uncertain for several reasons. First, it is unsettled whether scholars or their university employers are the authors and initial owners of scholarly articles under U.S. copyright law’s work-made-for-hire rules, which vest authorship and copyright ownership in the employer for works created by employees within the scope of employment. Second, the mandates are broad university policies that purport to grant the university nonexclusive copyright licenses in every scholarly article unless a faculty member affirmatively opts out on a per-article basis. Are the policies specific enough to provide the essential terms of the grant? Furthermore, can the mere adoption of a school policy, without some additional affirmative act by the author, effectuate such a grant without unduly encroaching upon the author’s autonomy interests? Lastly, even if the policies effectuate nonexclusive license grants, will the licenses survive after the author transfers copyright ownership to a journal publisher as per common practice? Section 205(e) of the Copyright Act provides that a prior nonexclusive license evidenced in a writing signed by the right holder prevails over a subsequent conflicting transfer of copyright ownership, so the answer appears to turn on whether permission mandates satisfy the requirements of § 205(e).

 

This Article argues that permission mandates can create legally enforceable, durable nonexclusive licenses. First, it argues that although there are important justifications, including academic freedom concerns, for recognizing the controversial “teacher exception” to the work for hire rules for scholarly articles, such an exception may be unnecessary because a strong argument also exists that much scholarship is produced outside the scope of employment for work for hire purposes. Second, it argues that permission mandates provide sufficient evidence of the grantor’s intent and the rights granted to create effective nonexclusive licenses. Third, permission mandates satisfy the requirements of § 205(e) and establish the license’s priority over the subsequent transfer of copyright ownership largely because they fulfill the underlying purposes of § 205(e) by providing sufficient evidence and notice of the license to potential copyright transferees (typically academic publishers). In reaching these conclusions, this Article emphasizes that Courts should consider the uniformity costs (social costs resulting from applying uniform rules and granting uniform entitlements across diverse conditions) that arise from applying to scholarly articles copyright rules developed to address proprietary models of information production. Applying the relevant copyright rules in a manner sensitive to the nonmarket nature of scholarly production is the most effective way to reduce these social costs, and reinforces the conclusion that mandate licenses are enforceable.

 

Lastly, the Article considers whether the opt-out nature of permission mandates offends notions of authorial autonomy in copyright. It compares permission mandates with another high profile opt-out licensing regime: the proposed Google Books settlement agreement, which the court rejected partly because of authorial autonomy concerns. Authorial autonomy is far less of a concern for scholarly articles than for the books at issue in the Google Books case, however, due to the nonmarket nature of scholarly article production coupled with academic community norms. Accordingly, it does not substantially interfere with authors’ autonomy interests to find that the opt-out structure of permission mandates creates valid nonexclusive licenses in universities.