UNT to launch open access debate

Organizers of the Open Access Symposium said they hope that the draft of an open access policy for UNT, which will be written by a committee created by the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, will be ready for campuswide discussions soon. The policy will draw from policies already adopted by other universities, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Kansas. Stevan Harnad, Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at Université du Québec à Montréal and founder of the American Scientist Open Access Forum, is the symposium's keynote speaker. Since the early 1990s, Harnad has been a vocal advocate for open access to scholarly literature. Other speakers include: • Clifford Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information • R. Michael Turner, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago • David E. Shulenburger, vice President for academic affairs at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities • Tyler O. Walters, associate director for technology and resource services at the Georgia Institute of Technology's Library and Information Center • David Eltis, the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History at Emory University and co-editor of "Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database," a free and interactive Web-based database that documents the slave trade from Africa to the New World between the 16th and 19th centuries; and • Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition since 2005. The UNT Libraries recently joined SPARC, an international alliance of academic and research libraries developed by the Association of Research Libraries.