Unclear if losing net neutrality will affect academic research access, CU Boulder officials say - Boulder Daily Camera

"The internet may not be neutral much longer, and its consequence to the accessibility of academic research has not yet been realized. "It's not a done deal that we're losing protections," said Phil Weiser, former President Barack Obama's chief senior adviser for technology and innovation and current Colorado attorney general candidate. The Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal net-neutrality rules in mid-December of last year, which overturned its 2015 ruling to support regulations under Obama's administration. "The FCC consistently fought to protect net neutrality," Weiser said. "This decision was a fairly extreme one for the FCC." The University of Colorado adopted a campuswide open access policy in October 2013 when students lobbied for the option. "The open access policy was adopted in large part as a collaboration between the libraries and graduate student government," said Melissa Cantrell, scholarly communications librarian at CU. "The younger cohort are more aware of the economic and political issues to sort of direct this push for open access." Open access is both a principle of equitable availability of information on the web and a publishing model where authors can distribute their research on free platforms. "This issue of net neutrality poses a whole new challenge to open access on that basis," Cantrell said. "If the research is open yet people aren't able to get it through their internet service provider, then that kind of defeats the purpose." Advertisement The school also maintains the Open Access Fund, which serves to assist authors of independent research in publishing their work through open, online academic journals. The fund posits that any student or faculty member can request up to $2,000 in grant money per academic year in order to cover the costs of publishing their research with the university's aid. Faculty and students still retain ownership over their papers and are free to publish them elsewhere, as CU retains nonexclusive, worldwide rights, according to the Open Access Fund webpage. This ensures that authors retain their intellectual freedom. The money comes from the library's portion of the school's overall budget, Cantrell said...."