The University of Glasgow has adopted an OA mandate. The proposal to the University Senate is dated June 5, 2008, and was apparently approved in time to take effect at the start of the current (08-09) academic year. The policy was announced late last week. From the policy proposal:
...A key element in the University’s plans to maximise the impact of peer-reviewed research publications is the need to make such publications as widely available as possible. It is the University’s policy to develop and implement a comprehensive publications database recording bibliographic information and providing access to, where possible, the full text, for all peer-reviewed, published research outputs produced by university staff. As research assessment moves towards bibliometric based metrics, this will support internal bibliometric analysis.
At present, the University strongly encourages authors to deposit copies of their peer-reviewed published work into the University’s Institutional Repository, Enlighten, and while this has had some effect on increasing the number of full text papers made available it is only a fraction of the University’s potential research output....
In order to achieve these objectives Senate is asked to approve a policy requiring staff to deposit:
electronic copies of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings
bibliographic details of all research outputs, and to encourage staff to provide the full text of other research outputs where appropriate....
Staff are asked to deposit a copy of peer-reviewed, published journal articles and conference proceedings into Enlighten, where copyright allows, as soon as possible after publication. Other research outputs such as book chapters and books can also be deposited if desired by authors. Where a publisher has placed an embargo on making an item openly available, the item will not be made publicly visible until the embargo period has expired....
Staff will only be asked to provide copies of publications where publisher agreements permit deposit in online repositories. Repository staff will check publishers’ copyright agreements to ensure that deposit is permitted. Under no circumstances will staff be required to make publications available in contravention of UK copyright law....
Repository staff can check funders’ Open Access policies and where staff are already required by their funders to deposit in a subject based repository such as UK PubMed Central, repository staff will ensure that links are made from Enlighten to the relevant repository. There will therefore be no requirement for staff to deposit in more than one repository.
Staff, or their representatives, can easily deposit items themselves via Enlighten or can email items directly to repository staff who will deposit them....
Comments
I applaud the mandatory language and the university's determination to improve upon its previous, non-mandatory policy. I like the way the university will integrate the OA repository and bibliometrics and the way it sees a well-populated OA repository as serving institutional interests directly, not just indirectly by serving faculty interests. I like the way Glasgow staff will help faculty deposit their articles and check to see whether copies already exist in funder repositories. (But when copies do already exist at funder repositories, wouldn't it make more sense for Glasgow to harvest its own copies rather than merely link to copies elsewhere?)
Glasgow leaves a loophole or opt-out for resisting publishers (deposit is only required "where publisher agreements permit deposit"). That will defeat much of the purpose of upgrading the policy from discretionary to mandatory. The Wellcome Trust and NIH policies, for example, close this loophole completely, and the Harvard policy shifts the opt-out from the publisher to the author. (In all those cases, authors must retain the key right to authorize OA and publisher permission is never needed.) If Glasgow receives fewer deposits than it wants, I hope it will follow one of those strategies and close the loophole.
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.
