The open access movement has been around for quite some time and their achievements are many and diverse. Still there’s so much more to be done especially since acting locally can be such a challenge.
While surfing the web and reading commentaries, visiting websites that clearly manifest good practice, I came across the following news at http://sciencecommons.org/
MIT passes university-wide Open Access resolution
Yesterday, by unanimous vote, MIT faculty adopted an Open Access resolution (text here) that will make scholarly articles available at no charge, freely to the public through DSpace – MIT’s repository service.
The way this policy works is that faculty authors grant the university non-exclusive permission to make their scholarly works available in a repository, with [...]
The article recommended reading “Open Doors and Open Minds: What faculty authors can do to ensure open access to their work through their institution”, Science Commons’ white paper with suggestions as to what we can do to ensure open access to our work through the universities where we work. Here’s a short checklist (p.10):
1. Identify key internal supporters and champions.
2. Research your institution’s rules and procedures to understand the right process for initiating the policy change.
3. Work with provosts, faculty governance, and the general counsel’s office to determine critical policy and legal requirements that must be met by the policy.
4. Work with an existing faculty committee or create an ad-hoc committee to study your institution’s scholarly communications policy.
5. Communicate the plan to faculty and key stakeholders and conduct surveys or obtain other feedback to determine faculty support.
6. Identify and take advantage of events for education and awareness building, such as seminars, discussion panels, presentations, and colloquia. Consider holding a workshop to discuss open access and the Harvard policy.
7. Develop a set of policy recommendations, including the scope of the University License, the deposit requirement, and opt-out provisions.
8. Identify critical resources and support that will be needed to implement the policy, including responsibility for maintaining an institutional archive. Prepare to provide resources to assist faculty in complying with the policy and working with publishers.
9. Plan for success: work with the institution library to make sure there is a repository to maintain and allow download of deposited articles and that it has sufficient capacity – or that there is a plan to create one.
10. Find the faculty who already are posting their work on the Internet by searching the Web and asking around. By their actions, they are signaling an understanding of why open access is important. Do the librarians have stories of access problems faced by faculty or other researchers?
Simple and helpful. Now it’s easier to start.
For those who are not familiar with open access yet, here’s a “An Introduction to the Scholar’s Copyright Project” by John Wilbanks:
And a few useful links:
Filed under: Personal , Open Access
