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CWRU Faculty Open Access (OA) Policy and FAQ

An information resource on the CWRU Faculty OA Policy approved by Faculty Senate March 2024.

Introduction: Faculty Open Access Policies

Open Access is an international set of principles and practices through which scholarly research outputs (e.g. peer-reviewed articles, conference papers, reports, monographs, datasets) are made freely available online to the public, without cost barriers to access or restrictions on reuse.

  • Mechanisms for enabling open access to scholarship are numerous and include, among others, open access repositories, open access journals, and open access policies.
  • Open access involves faculty, publishers, journals, and institutional repositories

  • Open access is a requirement for funding by many Federal agencies (e.g., NIH, NSF, DOE, NASA) and foundations (e.g., Gates, Mellon)

A Faculty Open Access policy is a policy of a research university or institution, funding agency, publisher, or other entity that enables the open dissemination and open use of scholarly research outputs.

Faculty Open Access Policies: definition

Policies, usually approved by the faculty’s own governing body, through which faculty grant their institutions certain non-exclusive rights to their scholarly articles for purposes of open dissemination (also known as “RIGHTS RETENTION” policies).

By definition these are faculty policies, not administrative or library policies.

A faculty open access policy at CWRU would have the following purposes:

  • To enable the widest possible dissemination of CWRU faculty-authored scholarship, regardless of where faculty choose to publish
  • To allow CWRU faculty to automatically retain rights to share and reuse their own scholarship, regardless of where faculty choose to publish
The Value of a Faculty Open Access Policy

By making CWRU scholarship openly available internationally,
including to researchers whose universities do not have a subscription to the journal of record,
it increases the scholarly impact of faculty and the visibility of research conducted at CWRU

Without a faculty OA policy -- under the status quo at CWRU -- individual faculty authors must decide what rights to retain or negotiate with a publisher:

  • Many authors unknowingly or inadvertently sign away copyright ownership of their articles to publishers
  • Authors can be restricted in how they can legally use and share their own scholarship
  • Default for most faculty authors: publisher owns copyrights, with their scholarship behind paywalls
  • Many authors do not realize that they have rights to share their scholarship openly, regardless of whether they choose to publish in an open access journal or pay a journal's open access fees

Faculty OA policies “shift the default” to enable open access:

  • OA polices retain rights for faculty and the university to openly disseminate faculty scholarship, enabling broader access and wider readership

Faculty open access policies are common, with nearly 80 universities and colleges in the U.S. having adopted such policies. Though policy types vary, consensus has emerged on the effectiveness of different open access policy statements, with analyses identifying “permissions-based” (also known as “Harvard-Style” or “Harvard-MIT” policies due to the development of such policies there) as the most effective and legally sound. The proposed statement in this resource is adapted from such policies, which have been developed, reviewed, and vetted by university counsels, legal experts in copyright and publishing, and faculty at adopting institutions to ensure the appropriate granting of rights from faculty to their respective institutions.