The Academic Council of Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary has adopted a mandate to deposit their scholarly output in Dspace, the University’s open access scholarly repository. The repository has been in place since March 2003 and currently provides access to a broad range of scholarly output, including a growing collection of full text university theses.
Members of the Council, comprised of archivists, curators, and librarians, have long supported open access through promotions on campus such as Open Access Day, membership in SPARC and Canadian Association of Research Libraries, support for online open access journals published through the University of Calgary Press, and an active program of introducing the repository to faculty and graduate students. Libraries and Cultural Resources also funds the $100,000 Open Access Authors Fund to assist researchers to publish in open access journals.
The text of the mandate is:
"As an active member of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary endorses the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration.
LCR academic staff members believe that the output of our scholarly activities should be as widely disseminated and openly available as possible. Our scholarly output includes but is not limited to journal articles, books and book chapters, presentations if substantial, conference papers and proceedings, and datasets.
Effective April 17, 2009, LCR academic staff commit to
Deposit their scholarly output in the University of Calgary’s open access scholarly repository
Promote Open Access on campus and assist scholars in making their research openly available
Where possible, publish their research in an open-access journal"
Comment. This is the third OA mandate for the LIS division of a university, after the Oregon State U policy in March and the U of Oregon policy earlier last week. Or more precisely, it's the third to be announced here on OAN. It was adopted and publicly announced before the U of Oregon policy. Note that the Calgary policy applies to books and datasets (and a few other categories), not just journal articles, and apparently offers no opt-out. It includes encouragement to publish in OA journals and to promote OA elsewhere on campus. Kudos to all at Calgary LCR.
Update (5/13/09). Also see the accompanying guidelines, especially the sections on open licenses (hence libre OA), permissions, and opt-outs. Excerpt:
...Each publication added to the repository is covered by a copyright license. Submitters can choose to use the standard University of Calgary DSpace license or they can create their own Creative Commons license. The license is added at the time of submission.
We encourage staff to negotiate permissions with publishers for journal articles, conference presentations, proceedings, etc. You can also check the Sherpa site to review the archiving policy of your journal publisher.
Where publishers do not allow self-archiving or retain copyright over an individual’s publication, authors are requested to submit a metadata record for their publication and to indicate that copyright permission for publishing in the repository has not been obtained. Publishers who use a “moving wall” are acceptable under these guidelines; however, the author must provide this information prior to submitting....
Comment. When a given publisher won't allow OA on Calgary's terms, it would be better to deposit the full-text article and keep it non-OA (a "dark deposit") than to deposit only metadata.
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.
