July 28, 2011 - 6:50pm
SACUA proposes new scholarly article open access policy
BY STEPHANIE STEINBERG
Before faculty members give copies of their published articles to students, the University must pay a loyalty to the publisher of the article. But a new faculty scholarly access policy discussed at the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs meeting yesterday could soon change that.
Robert Fraser, vice chair of SACUA and assistant director of the Mardigian Library, said SACUA is looking to form a new policy that would save the University money by not requiring it to pay loyalty fees on scholarly articles.
“The academic community at large is trying to look at ways to deal with this particular issue because it’s a matter of millions of dollars every year,” he said.
Two versions of a new policy were presented to the board yesterday.
The first version states that the University would be granted ownership and complete control of all copyrights of faculty articles. Once a faculty member gives the University permission to access his or her article, the faculty member may not retract the access. However, the University would not be allowed to sell the article for a profit or permit other parties to sell the work.
In the policy, faculty would provide an electronic copy of their article to the Provost’s Office. The office would then make the work available in an open access repository on the Internet where the public would be able to search, read or download the texts.
The policy would only apply to current faculty members' articles that are published after the adoption of the proposal.
In the second version of the policy, the same guidelines as in the first version would be applied. However, once given to the Provost’s Office, public access of the article may be delayed up to one year from the date of publication. If this occurs, the University’s Ann Arbor, Flint and Dearborn campuses would still have access to the article, in addition to authorized users of the University Library.
At the meeting, Fraser explained how other schools such as Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Kansas University have adopted similar open-access policies.
The Senate Assembly will discuss the proposed policy at the Senate Assembly meeting later this month.
— Debjani Mukherjee contributed to this report.
