Faculty Open Access policies typically work by:
- Creating a legal mechanism under copyright law for faculty members to:
- Grant the university permission to disseminate faculty-authored scholarly articles openly, regardless of where faculty where choose to publish
- Reserve the rights of faculty to use and share their scholarly articles
- Providing rights only to the “author’s final manuscript” version of the article (i.e., the manuscript that includes changes made as a result of the peer-review process, but prior to publisher’s copy-editing or formatting
- This is the same version as required by many funder policies
- The “version of record” (VoR) may also used if publisher copyrights permit
Faculty Open Access Policies DO NOT:
- Dictate where faculty can publish
- Require faculty to deposit their scholarly articles
- Faculty can opt out at any time for any reason, with automatic waivers
- Solve all problems in scholarly publishing
- Faculty open access policies, by design, are only one mechanism among many to facilitate more open and equitable access to scholarly research
- Compete with publisher nor put the out of business
- Any publisher can request authors to opt-out of the policy as a measure of self-protection. However, very few require this as a matter of policy.
- Publishers understand the scholarly marketplace enough to know that faculty open access policies are extremely common, and most cooperate with such policies.
- OA policy institutions respect publisher embargoes on sharing the work post-publication
- Automatically make all faculty scholarship immediately open access
- Processes would still need to be determined, planned, and implemented to share the articles under the policy.
- Relate to publication in open access journals or faculty sharing their work on other open access websites, e.g. SSRN, arXiv, PubMed
Faculty Open Access Policies are Determined by Faculty:
- Consistent with the Faculty Handbook and the university’s policies on academic freedom, faculty would continue to be free to publish in the venues of their choosing
- Faculty open access policies are "journal-agnostic" -- it would not require publication in an open access journal, nor does the policy relate to any article publication charges, subsidies, or open access publication fees an author may encounter from a journal or publisher
- Faculty open access policies retain rights for the faculty and the university to share their scholarly articles openly, regardless of where faculty choose to publish their work
- Faculty could opt out of the deposit for a specific article for any reason; there is no central authority to approve or deny requests
- Individual faculty members do not need to take any particular action unless they choose to opt-out actively for a given article
- Individual faculty could (but would not be required) to submit articles to Scholarly Commons, the university's institutional repository
- Integration with FIS and faculty public research profile systems would make deposit easier for faculty
Forms of scholarship covered by the proposed Faculty Open Access Policy:
- “Scholarly articles” – i.e., research results published to advance inquiry and knowledge, without expectation of payment; typically presented in peer-reviewed journals or conference proceedings
- “Author’s final manuscript” – the final version of the author’s article incorporating any changes made as a result of the peer-review process, but prior to publisher’s copy-editing or formatting
- “Version of Record” (i.e. final published version) *only if publisher copyright permits*
NOT covered: books or other royalty-generating work, popular articles, fiction and poetry, encyclopedia entries, ephemeral writings, lecture notes, lecture videos, other copyrighted works, or other IP covered by university policies