DigitalKoans

On June 26, Stevan Harnad and Leslie Carr broke the story that John Willinsky had announced an open access mandate for Stanford University's School of Education in a speech at ELPub 2008. Peter Suber then posted a link to the video of the speech.

Today, Willinsky posted the Stanford University School of Education Open Access Motion on the SPARC-OAForum, noting that it "was passed unanimously by the faculty of the School of Education, Stanford University on June 10, 2008, and was cleared by the Provost's Office and Stanford University's legal counsel on June 25th, 2008."

Here's the text of the motion:

In recognition of its responsibility to make its research and scholarship as widely and publicly available as possible, the faculty of the Stanford University School of Education is determined to take advantage of new technologies to increase access to its work among scholars worldwide, educators, policymakers, and the public. In support of greater openness in scholarly and educational endeavors, the faculty of the School of Education agree to the following policy:

Faculty members grant to the Stanford University permission to make publicly available their scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. They grant to Stanford University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to their scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are properly attributed to the authors not sold for a profit.

The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while a faculty member of the School of Education, beginning with articles for which the publisher's copyright agreement has yet to be signed. The Dean or the Dean's designate will waive application of the policy upon written request from faculty who wish to publish an article with a publisher who will not agree to the terms of this policy (which will be presented to the publishers in the form of an addendum to the copyright agreement).

No later than the date of publication, faculty members will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Dean of Education's Office, who will make the article available to the public in an open-access repository operated by Stanford University.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending policy changes to the School of Education from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented on the policy to the School of Education.

Willinsky also posted on the list "Questions and Answers on Harvard’s Open Access Motion," which is "a series of questions and responses that arose as part of a discussions of passing such a motion at the Stanford University School of Education (SUSE) by Claude Goldenberg, Roy Pea, Sean Reardon, and John Willinsky."

Peter Suber has commented on these Stanford documents in his "Details on the Stanford OA Mandate" posting.

In a Library Journal article ("At SPARC Forum, News of the University of California’s Open Access Near Miss") published today, a "representative of Harvard Medical School" is quoted as saying: "I think we’re going to be the next school to go for OA." (This article provides some brief additional information about the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences and Law School mandates and discusses as yet unsuccessful efforts at the University of California to pass a mandate.)

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has recognized Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences as SPARC Innovators.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

A February 12 vote made the Harvard faculty the first in the U.S. to embrace an Open Access directive and the first to grant permission to the university to make their articles openly available. The policy, drafted by a 10-member provost’s committee, was ratified by unanimous vote of a quorum of faculty members.

The Harvard FAS vote and Open Access policy emerged at a time when there is growing concern among faculty that traditional publishing processes are not ensuring maximum access to their research.

"The FAS vote confirms that broadening access to their collective output is of fundamental importance to our faculty, and that they are willing to take strong and decisive action to ensure the accessibility of their works," adds Stuart M. Shieber, professor of computer science at Harvard, Chair of the provost’s committee, and recently named director of the university’s new Office of Scholarly Communication.

The new SPARC Innovator profile details the process that led to the faculty’s ultimate vote. It explores motivations behind the decision to take action, looks at how members of the faculty were informed and engaged, why the Open Access requirement and its opt-out provision emerged, and how Harvard has paved the way for other institutions to follow suit.

"People think Harvard can do this kind of thing because Harvard is so rich," said Shieber. "The irony is that the reason people here got involved was the financial unsustainability—even at Harvard—of the current scholarly publishing regime, which has led to a steady erosion of access as we and other institutions must cancel subscriptions. The goal of this and future policies we will develop is not to save money. The goal is to broaden access."

"Harvard’s leadership on this issue is an inspiration to academic institutions across the country," said Diane Graves, University Librarian at Trinity University in San Antonio. "Thanks to Harvard’s prestigious reputation and the unanimous vote by the Arts and Sciences faculty, colleges and universities throughout North America have the incentive to start—or strengthen—similar conversations between their libraries and the faculty. This landmark vote—and the votes that are sure to follow—signals the beginning of a new, sustainable model for scholarly communication."

"Harvard’s success was possible because of the determination of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to ensure the widest exposure of their research. We hope their forward-looking step will serve as invitation to other campuses and departments of all kinds to explore their own policies for research access," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. "It is SPARC’s pleasure to highlight their achievement in as many ways as we can. . . ."

The SPARC Innovator program recognizes advances in scholarly communication propelled by an individual, institution, or group. Typically, these advances exemplify SPARC principles by challenging the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities, and the public.

ALA's Association College & Research Libraries has made available a new ACRL Publications Agreements FAQ, which covers serials, book chapters, book editors, and podcasts.

The FAQ's statement about Creative Commons licenses and serials is of special interest:

We didn’t want to require our authors to publish their works using a Creative Commons license, but you are welcome to attach the CC license of your choosing to your work after it is published by ACRL. Visit the Creative Commons website (http://creativecommons.org/) to learn more about their licensing options.

This is welcome news, and ACRL is to be applauded for supporting the use of Creative Commons licenses.

It is very helpful to have a concise and clear explanation of ACRL's copyright and other publication policies regarding serials, and the information about book chapters, book editors, and podcasts is very helpful as well. It would be highly desirable for other ALA divisions to follow ACRL's lead in this matter.

Note that ACRL's copyright forms are on the ACRL Forms page.

Starting with its just released third issue, the Code4Lib Journal is using the Creative Commons Attribution License for its articles, making this freely available journal an open access journal under the strictest definition of that term (sometimes called "full open access").

Here's an excerpt from the editorial that discusses this change:

In order to facilitate the ability of our readers to build upon the ideas presented in the Journal, beginning with Issue 3 all articles are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. The CC-BY license lets you reuse, share, and build upon the work presented in the article, as long as you credit the author for the original creation. This licensing is required for inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and to receive a SPARC Europe Seal. Code snippets included in the text are included under the CC-BY license. For other code included with an article, we recommend, but don’t require, an open source license. We are contacting all authors with articles published in previous issues to request they license their previously published Code4Lib Journal articles under the CC-BY license.

In a forthcoming "Early View" editorial in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology ("JASIST Open Access"), Donald H. Kraft announces that JASIST will permit self-archiving "on the Contributor's personal Web site or in the Contributor's institution's/employer's institutional repository or archive" (institutional intranets are also permitted). This excludes disciplinary archives, such as dLIST and E-LIS, which are global in nature.

Such self-archiving can occur for both preprints and postprints. The author cannot "update the submission version [version submitted for consideration that has not undergone peer review] or replace it with the published Contribution." However, the author can "update the preprint [accepted version that has undergone peer review] with any corrections."

JASIST is the research journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, which "counts among its membership some 4,000 information specialists from such fields as computer science, linguistics, management, librarianship, engineering, law, medicine, chemistry, and education; individuals who share a common interest in improving the ways society stores, retrieves, analyzes, manages, archives and disseminates information, coming together for mutual benefit."

A three-segment video about the historical development of open access to legal information, titled A Short History of Legal Information Institutes, is available from LexUM on YouTube.

• Segment 1
• Segment 2
• Segment 3

David J. Solomon has made a 19-page abridged version of his book Developing Open Access Journals: A Practical Guide freely available.

The Association of College and Research Libraries has sent a letter of support to SCOAP³.

Here's an excerpt:

On behalf of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA) representing over 13,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals, I am writing to express interest and support for SCOAP³, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics’ effort to facilitate open access publishing in High Energy Physics (HEP). . . .

ACRL believes that SCOAP³ is a valuable addition to the heterogeneous mix of strategies being undertaken by scholars, publishers, libraries, and others to ensure the future of high-quality journals. SCOAP³ is unique in its explicit goals to unite researchers and libraries and to partner with publishers so that aggregated financial contributions will support HEP publishing, make the results available at no cost to any reader any where, and serve as a potential model to other disciplines.

Therefore ACRL encourages its members to consider joining the SCOAP³ effort when appropriate, e.g. through an institutional or consortial "expression of interest" (as outlined at http://www.scoap3.org/), providing education and outreach about SCOAP3 to their faculty, library staff and administrators, and finding other ways to analyze and support SCOAP³ where possible.