In a move designed to broaden access to faculty research and scholarship, the School of Education at Stanford recently adopted a policy requiring its faculty members to make their scholarly articles available for free to the public.
The school's faculty unanimously approved the new "open access" policy in June, becoming the first education school in the nation to enact a mandatory policy.
An estimated 30 universities around the world have adopted similar plans.
Deborah Stipek, dean of Stanford's School of Education, said its faculty acted out of a sense of duty to the students, teachers and schools that could benefit from their research.
"Educational researchers have a responsibility to ensure that their findings are accessible to anyone who can use the new knowledge to improve student learning," Stipek said. "This policy is more than a symbolic stand. It will have the tangible effect of making the most recent findings related to effective education available to the people who can use them the most—policy makers, administrators and teachers." ...
John Willinsky, a professor of education at Stanford who presented the proposal to faculty, said the people who will benefit the most from the new policy are those who lack access to university libraries, which make journals available to students, faculty and staff....
Earlier this year, Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Law School adopted open access policies in separate, unanimous votes. Willinsky said he based Stanford's policy on the one approved by Harvard Law School....
Willinsky said the School of Education's new policy recognizes the valuable contribution publishers make to the system by granting publishers rights to the final, published version of the article as it appears in journals, while giving Stanford the right to post the author's final, peer-reviewed version of the article on a university website.
PS: For details on the Stanford policy, see my posts from June 26 and June 29.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/09/2008 09:27:00 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.
