Open Access Week: University Commitments to Open Access

Many universities around the world have made commitments to making their scholarly works open access.  Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences made waves in 2008 by unanimously passing the first faculty-initiated Open Access Policy in the United States. Harvard’s FAS were shortly joined by the Harvard School of Law, Stanford’s College of Education, Boston University, MIT, and many others.  Currently, there are over 241 policies worldwide listed in ROARMAP, the Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies.

On October 20, 2010, the Librarians Assembly of ASU Libraries passed an Open Access Resolution declaring our commitment to Open Access. Specifically, we resolve:

1. To disseminate our scholarship as broadly as possible.  We endeavor to make our scholarly work openly accessible in conformance with open access principles.  Whenever possible, we make our scholarship available in digital format, online, and free of charge.
2. To grant ASU Libraries a Creative Commons “Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States” license to each of our scholarly works to allow the ASU Libraries the right to archive and make publicly available the full text of our scholarly works via the ASU Libraries’ digital repository.
3. To deposit the author’s final version of our scholarly work in the digital repository as soon as is possible, recognizing that some publishers may impose an embargo period.
4. To seek publishers whose policies allow us to make our scholarly works freely available online.  When a publisher’s policies do not allow us to make our works freely available online, we resolve to engage in good faith negotiations with the publisher to allow deposit of pre- or post-print versions of our scholarly work in the digital repository.
5. To promote Open Access on campus and assist scholars in making their research openly available.

Today, Arizona State University Librarians join a worldwide movement towards Open Access.  We don’t think there’s a better way to celebrate Open Access Week!