Campus News

April 1, 2011

Take Note

Vote backs open access to Emory articles

Open access to Emory faculty-authored scholarly articles and a digital repository for the works were supported by a Faculty Council vote at its March meeting.

The Council's unanimous vote backs immediate and unrestrained access and an "opt-in" approach to faculty participation in the digital repository.

Key points are:

• authors will retain sufficient copyrights to their own work;

• the open access digital repository must be easy to use for authors and readers;

• the open access policy will be subject to periodic review and critique.

The Council wants to minimize any administrative burdens by "harvesting" Emory faculty work already available in existing repositories.

Pending administrative approval of the Council's position, the Emory Libraries staff would need about four months to review the University's current Electronic Theses and Dissertations system, said Rick Luce, director of University Libraries.

The staff would assess this system to see how it might be adapted for the new repository. Other open-source products would also be evaluated for possible use. Then a prototype for the project would be developed for testing.

The vote is the culmination of almost two years of University-wide conversation requested by the Library Policy Committee, which advises the library administration on library policy, and facilitated by the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence in collaboration with the Office of Intellectual Property Rights.

See a full copy of the Open Access Policy proposal.

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