BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Iowa Board of Regents - Motion Encouraging Authors to Retain Intellectual Property Rights
On May 2002, The Iowa Board of Regents adopted the following statement (motion carried unanimously):
“The Board strongly encourages faculty, students, and employees of Regent institutions to seek to retain intellectual property rights to the articles and reports that they publish in scholarly journals and equivalent types of publications where feasible and appropriate without detriment to publishing agreements. Doing so on a systematic basis will ensure the widest possible dissemination at the lowest cost. Each institution shall be responsible for providing information, advice, and assistance to faculty, students, and employees to achieve this aim."
Institutional Repository @ UNI
- The University plans to implement an institutional repository in 2014/2015 using bepress’s Digital Commons platform.
- Rod Library plans to hire a Digital Scholarship Librarian with an anticipated August 2014 start date. The Digital Scholarship Librarian will serve as the manager of the institutional repository and will coordinate education and outreach for scholarly communication across campus.
UNI Author Addendum
- UNI faculty and staff are encouraged to use the UNI Author Addendum to modify publisher agreements so that more control is retained by the author. This would allow placement in the UNI institutional repository (IR) and provide greater access to publications. Many journal publishers allow for full or limited author retention of copyrights.
- The UNI Author Addendum is based on the Big Ten Universities’ Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Author Addendum. Permission was given by the CIC office for use of the CIC Author Addendum as a template in the development of the UNI Author Addendum.
Open Access Philosophy and the International Open Access Movement
- Open Access (OA) is related to the broader topic of scholarly communication, the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, disseminated, and preserved. Open Access is an alternative to existing high-cost publishing models. An Open Access article allows anyone, anywhere, access to research at no charge to the reader. Authors retain copyright and control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
- Two methods for delivering Open Access to research articles are Open Access journals and Open Access repositories or archives. Archives may be associated with institutions, such as universities and laboratories, or disciplines, such as physics and economics. For Open Access journals there are different categories.
- Open Access Journals – The journal uses a model that doesn't charge readers or their institutions for access. There are many different categories of Open Access (OA) journals. TheDirectory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides a list of over 3,000.
- Open Access Articles - Many well-established publishers now offer authors a paid Open Access option for an additional “author fee.” Therefore, many journals now have both traditional closed access articles as well as Open Access articles in the same issue. Both types of articles go through the same review process.
- The SHERPA/RoMEO website allows faculty to search for individual journals or publishers to find information on how they handle Open Access. Many well-established publishers (such as Elsevier, Sage, and Wiley) allow for some form of Open Access.
- A growing number of funding agencies (e.g., National Institutes of Health – NIH) now require that a duplicate of any research paper be placed in an Open Access repository. When this mandate is a condition of the grant, resulting research papers must have archiving plans already developed before submission to any journal. Publishers are aware of these mandates and now provide Open Access accommodations.
Benefits Related to Open Access
- Where you publish makes a difference - Studies have shown that Open Access articles have more views/downloads than non-open access articles. Open Access articles tend to be more frequently used and cited, therefore research has higher impact (see Hitchcock, 2013).
- The following statement is from the OASIS: Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook:
“Open Access benefits researchers, institutions, nations and society as a whole. For researchers, it brings increased visibility, usage and impact for their work. Institutions enjoy the same benefits in aggregated form. There is growing evidence to show that countries also benefit because Open Access increases the impact of the research in which they invest public money…and therefore there is a better return on investment.”
Faculty Issues/Concerns about Open Access
Information in this section is adapted from theOASIS: Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook.
- Copyright – Authors worry whether they are allowed to make their work Open Access because of copyright restrictions imposed by their publishers. These conditions vary with the publisher. When copyright remains with the author, he or she is permitted to make unlimited numbers of copies for distribution and use them for teaching.
With respect to self-archiving in repositories, authors worry that the publisher, who in most cases holds the copyright, will not permit this activity. In fact, even without completing an author addendum, over 60% of journals do allow self-archiving of the final, peer-reviewed version of an article (the ‘postprint’) and a further 32% allow the author to self-archive the article before it has been peer reviewed (the ‘preprint’). Many authors are unaware of this opportunity.
- Peer review - Some people mistakenly think Open Access equates to vanity publishing (i.e., that you can pay to have an article published). There is a range of quality in open access journals just as there is in traditional print journals. Open Access journals employ the same peer review practices as traditional, closed access journals and need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
- Lack of funding for the author fees – Faculty worry about a lack of funding to support Open Access author fees. Currently there is no centralized funding for “author fees” at UNI. In the Spring of 2013, the University of Iowa developed a central fund sponsored by the Provost Office and the University of Iowa Libraries to support faculty open access author fees.
Challenges of the Traditional Subscription Based Scholarly Communication Model
- In recent years the traditional subscription based scholarly communication model has posed increasing challenges to academic libraries, and the UNI Rod Library has not been immune to these challenges. While journal and database subscription prices have inflated on a continuing basis over the past decade, the Library’s materials budget has remained static. The inevitable result has been journal and database cancellations and declining funds for other (e.g., monograph) purchases. Over the past decade, the purchasing power of the Library’s material budget has declined by nearly 40%. During the current fiscal year (FY 2013-14), without the infusion of supplemental one-time funds by the Provost and the Dean of Library Services, there would have been no funds available to purchase books.
- Even if the Library’s materials budget were to receive annual increases, the ever increasing volume of scholarly output being published along with routine inflation in subscription prices make providing library resources within the traditional subscription based pricing model unsustainable over time. The Library has and must continue to respond to this challenge in multiple ways (e.g., shifting to electronic resources, consortial purchases, cancellation projects, ongoing collection analysis and resource reallocation, etc.).
- The new paradigm offered by the Open Access movement presents an opportunity to address the fundamental challenge to providing scholarly resources to the academic community.
Additional Resources
