Open Access News

Canada's Athabasca University has adopted an OA policy.  (Thanks to Virtual Canuck via OA Librarian.)  The policy:

Athabasca University requests that academic and professional staff deposit an electronic copy of any published research articles (as elsewhere accepted for publication) in an Athabasca University repository. The contract with the publisher determines whether the article is restricted (lives in the repository as a record of the University’s research but is not accessible online by searchers) or open access (accessible online by searchers).

From Terry Anderson at Virtual Canuck:

We argued that this policy was consistent with Athabasca’s commitments to access as “Canada’s Open University”. We had originally hoped that the verb “request” could be strengthened to “requires” but the fears of curtailment of so-called “academic freedom” scared some away and we compromised on the weaker “requests”. To support self-archiving, the AU library has installed a version of MIT’s DSpace known locally as AUSpace...

I was somewhat surprised at the lack of understanding of Open Access publishing and of the need for action on the part of individual scholars to insure that works funded by public funds are made available to the public. The hundreds of thousands of dollars spent annually by even small Universities like Athabasca on database services that provide full text of many (most) proprietary publications has lulled many academics into a sense that such services are available to all scholars. This is obviously not the case and especially not in areas of the 3rd world....

From Heather Morrison at OA Librarian:

Congratulations to Athabasca University for taking one small step forward. However, this is a weak policy, for two reasons, and I would strongly suggest that other universities considering an open access policy not emulate this one.

First, it requests rather than requires academic and professional staff to deposit published research. Experience has shown that policies that request deposit simply do not work, whereas policies that require deposit are extremely effective. Also, rather than beginning with voluntary compliance, the nature of open access is that it makes more sense to start with the requirement - because as soon as faculty and staff experience the impact advantage, and other advantages of convenience, with open access, from a requirement, they will quickly come to appreciate open access, and so they will happily voluntary self-archive.

Second, it leaves the question of open access up to the publishers. Even setting aside the rights of the university, its students and alumni and taxpayer funders at a public institution like Athabasca - universities wishing to educate faculty members about open access would do well to also advise faculty members about their rights, too. Authors and scholars do not need to give up their copyright in order to have their work published; the only copyright that an author need give a publisher, is simply the right to publish; authors can do this and retain their copyright, too.

The vast majority of traditional publishers already routinely allow self-archiving of preprints or peer-reviewed postprints, or both....

As a proud former student [of AU], I would like to point out that, if Athabasca University's new open access policy is not exemplary in the area of self-archiving, AU has long been a leader in open access publishing, as the home of ICAAP, the International Coalition for the Advancement of Academic Publishing....