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Open at CUNY

A group for CUNY faculty, staff, and graduate students interested in open access publishing for scholarly communication, open educational resources, and open teaching and scholarship.

Group avatar includes the Open Access Publishing logo designed by PLoS and available on Wikipedia, and was created by Monica Berger, City Tech.

Any other library departments mandating OA publishing?

  • Jill and Alycia shared the bright idea at the LACUNY forum last week that individual departments might step ahead of their institutions to mandate OA publishing. Just wondering if you have heard of any precedent for this action – in libraries or not.

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  • With thanks to Maura and others at City Tech, and everyone at the LACUNY Dialogues for giving us a push, here’s precedent, although not an absolute mandate, from City Tech (Brooklyn) via Gustavus Adolphus (Minnesota):

    City Tech Library Faculty: Statement on Open Access

    The City Tech library faculty believe that open access to scholarship is critical for scholarly communication and for the future of libraries. For that reason we pledge to make our own research freely available whenever possible by seeking publishers that have either adopted open access policies, publish contents online without restriction, and/or allow authors to self-archive their publications on the web. We pledge to link to and/or self-archive our publications to make them freely accessible.

    Faculty librarians may submit their work to a publication that does not follow open access principles and will not allow self archiving only if it is clearly the best or only option for publication; however, library faculty will actively seek out publishers that allow them to make their research available freely online and, when necessary, will negotiate with publishers to improve publication agreements. Further, we pledge to devote most of our reviewing and editing efforts to manuscripts destined for open access.

    This statement is adapted from the Gustavus Adolphus Library Faculty Open Access Pledge (http://gustavus.edu/library/Pubs/OApledge.html)

    Darrow, that’s awesome! I wonder if on a related note we should be thinking of incorporating a statement about open access into our tenure and promotion guidelines that, in effect, says that tenure and promotion committees will give special notice to any efforts to publish in OA outlets.

    Go, City Tech! I hope we’ll follow suit soon at Brooklyn!

    Reappointment, tenure, and promotion are not strictly departmental decisions, so although a department can certainly encourage publishing in OA journals, one can’t require it or give special credence to it before educating the rest of the Chairs (as well as Provost and President) who comprise the College P&B. Last Spring, while I was still a Chair, I was asked to lead a discussion at College P&B about OA, and I distributed the PPT presentation that Maura and Jill did on OA for the CUNY Academic Council – a belated thanks to both @msmale and @cirasella for putting together a great document – which at the least laid a foundation to educate the other Chairs that just because something was free and open didn’t mean that it was not scholarly. And it might have even won some converts. But for insitutions whose P&Bs like to hear about journal impact factors during candidate presentations, it will take more education, or else we could have candidates who pass Dept P&B but get turned down at the next level because they didn’t publish in the widely known top 10 journals in their field as defined by Journal Citation Reports. Just my two cents.

    That’s really inspiring, Darrow!

    Harvard Open Access Policies:
    http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/policies

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