Faculty Open Access Policies: Public Missions, Public Research, Public Good

Abstract: Open access (OA) to faculty scholarship is a high profile issue for universities today. OA has the potential, over time, to fundamentally change the model by which the research outcomes of university faculty are shared. There are obvious merits in shifting the economic model of scholarly communication and opening the door to research information to a wider and global audience. At the same time, discussions of open access are often laced with the concerns of the faculty. Will OA diminish the value of faculty work, create barriers to promotion and tenure, present additional burdens for faculty as they assert their rights with publishers or self-submit their work to an open repository? There are also many issues in implementing OA policies for faculty groups and campus administrators to consider such as how (or if) the institution will monitor participation, the allocation of resources, and how OA may be used to reflect scholars’ (and their institutions’) commitment to the public access to the results of their scholarship. This presentation will discuss faculty efforts on three campuses to plant the seeds for faculty-initiated open access policies, working with faculty colleagues and faculty governance bodies to pass such policies, and current implementation strategies. Implications ahead for developing significantly more robust and complementary methods of providing unfettered access to scholarship will also be discussed.