The University of Minho in Portugal has adopted a policy mandating that its faculty deposit their research (with a few exceptions), and that grad students deposit their theses and dissertations, in the university's open-access repository. The university has also decided to sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge. The new policy was adopted on December 6, 2004, and will take effect on January 1, 2005. For more details, see the university press release (in Portuguese or in English).
(PS: This is the first university policy I know of with an explicit mandate for OA archiving by its faculty. The Queensland University of Technology was the pioneer on this trail, and had a similar policy in place more than a year ago. But QUT stopped one hair short of a mandate, and merely announced the expectation that faculty scholarship "is to be" on deposit in the university repository. The new Minho policy says that faculty "must" archive their publications. Kudos to the Minho rector and administration for their forthright and beneficial policy. Moreover, they adodpted it for the right reason. Quoting Eloy Rodrigues' English translation of the press release: 'It's in the best interest of University of Minho...to maximise the visibility, usage and impact of the scientific output of its schools/departments and teachers/researchers.')
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/20/2004 11:20:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
