University will devise open access policies

As more academic publications become readily available to view online for free, officials said university professors are struggling to embrace the open access movement when it comes to their own research — an issue a university task force is preparing to tackle.

On April 7, the University Senate approved the formation of a task force that will begin to make the complex process — which allows online users to view publications without having to pay a fee — easier to navigate for faculty members interested in posting their copyrighted research or journals online.

Faculty members often do not understand whether they can publish their research online if it has already been sold and copyrighted to a publisher, said Associate Provost for Academic Planning and Programs Elizabeth Beise, a member of the University Library Council.

While some publishers allow the author to retain some rights to their work, other companies insist on owning all copyrights, and it is often unclear what professors can legally post online. Because publishing agreements vary with each professor — especially between faculty from the sciences and those from the humanities — Beise said a task force needed to be assembled to devise concrete policies.

"People from two different sides of campus had disagreements about what open access was," she said. "Most of us are not really well-informed about what the issues are, and there's changing federal legislation and changing responses from publishers to making scholarly work more available. We felt there needed to be a more focused task force to figure out how our campus and our libraries should be responding to what's happening around us."

A senate subcommittee first proposed adopting open access policies two years ago, but that was ultimately voted down because the issue was so complex. Since then, the library council has been studying open access issues and ultimately recommended at last week's senate meeting that the university address the issue once and for all.

Library council chairwoman and English professor Martha Nell Smith said open access issues have been framed too simplistically in the past, noting there is no "one size fits all solution" because each department deals with different publishers and copyrights.

"What we need is an open access council — a knowledgeable body representing different constituencies, and then that body could advise individual faculty members and different groups so that we're dealing with the issue in an informed way," she said. "Open access will be adopted for various constituencies in ways that are sustainable and that meet the needs of knowledge production and distribution so we can put before both our faculty and our students the best access possible to new knowledge."

Additionally, it's often unclear to professors what their royalty rights are — when research is published in print, the author usually receives money every time a copy is purchased. But that line is blurred once information is made accessible online for free.

"What the library committee felt this group could do was get some of these issues out and get people to try to understand what these complex issues are," Beise said. "Faculty need to understand their copyrights and what they own and don't own."

University Libraries Dean Patricia Steele said she hopes open access will increase among the campus community once formal policies are in place and more faculty members open up to the idea.

"When we have the infrastructure in place, we hope to start open access journals, and we're thinking other people might be interested in this," she said. "People can't fear that it's going to happen to them tomorrow or that it's going to be forced upon them because it probably doesn't work in certain disciplines. It's not a simple sort of issue, but it's nothing to be threatened by and nothing's going to be proposed that's going to hurt anyone."

Journalism professor Ira Chinoy, who also helped draft the resolution, said addressing open access issues will help propel the university forward as a leading research institution.

"This is a great opportunity for the university to get in front of something that's clearly taken on a life in the academic and intellectual community and to do it in a way that really wraps together a lot of constituencies that makes sense for everybody," he said.

abutaleb at umdbk dot com