A number of prominent institutions have over the past few years passed open access “mandates,” requiring campus authors (unless a waiver is sought) to deposit copies of their scholarly articles in the school’s institutional repository–their equivalent of our Iowa Research Online , or IRO. Passage of these mandates has come about through the efforts of faculty concerned about problems in the system of scholarly publishing, and been passed by the equivalents of Iowa’s Faculty Senate. Institutions with open access mandates include Harvard, Duke, MIT and Kansas, among others.
Now a group of these institutions have formed the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, or Coapi, to help address the issues that arise in implementing such policies. University of Kansas Dean of Libraries Lorraine Haricombe observed:
“Society depends on universities for the creation of new knowledge, so we have a responsibility to disseminate and share that knowledge to gain the most benefit for science and society. This new coalition will offer academic institutions an opportunity to stand together and establish open access to knowledge in the sciences and humanities as a broad societal norm.”
Marc L. Greenberg, professor and chair of the Slavic Languages and Literatures department added:
“I always keep the idea of ‘knowledge as a public good’ in mind in doing work for open access and I view what we do as part of renegotiating the social contract between universities and society. Universities belong to the public.”
See the story by Jennifer Howard in today’s Wired Campus: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/universities-join-together-to-support-open-access-policies/32632?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
