[BOAI] OA mandate for U of Oregon Library Faculty

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from J.Q. Johnson.  --Peter Suber.]


The University of Oregon Library Faculty this morning (May 7) unanimously 
adopted a resolution mandating deposit of scholarly works produced by 
library faculty members in our institutional repository. The text of the 
resolution is:

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The Library Faculty of the University of Oregon are committed to 
disseminating the fruits of their research and scholarship as widely as 
possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following 
policy:

Each Library faculty member gives to the University of Oregon nonexclusive 
permission to use and make available that author's scholarly articles for 
the purpose of open dissemination. Specifically, each Library faculty 
member grants a Creative Commons "Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative 
Works 3.0 United States" license to each of his or her scholarly articles. 
The license will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person 
is a member of the Library Faculty except for any articles accepted for 
publication before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which 
the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment 
agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean of the Libraries 
will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written 
notification by the author, who informs the UO of the reason.

To facilitate distribution of the scholarly articles, as of the date of 
publication, each faculty member will make available an electronic copy of 
the author's final version of the article and full citation at no charge to 
a designated representative of the Libraries in appropriate formats (such 
as PDF) specified by the Libraries. After publication, the University of 
Oregon Libraries will make the scholarly article available to the public in 
the UO's institutional repository.

----------------------

We largely followed the leads of Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and most recently 
Oregon State (our friends and rivals).  One area where we differ is in 
explicitly mandating a CC-BY-NC-ND license.  Choosing that license was very 
conscious.  We believe that it is vital that the community standardize on a 
small number of licenses to move beyond the present mess where every 
publisher and practically every author has their own unique terms.  The 
license we chose is a good candidate for standardization.  It grants 
sufficient rights for most scholarly purposes, but is also minimalist, and 
hence has some hope of being acceptable to authors who wish to retain 
rights (for instance, many knowledgeable faculty members I've talked to 
don't want to give up the derivative works right) and to reasonable 
publishers.  For example (I'm speculating here as a member of ACM), we 
believe that Harvard would have a much better chance of getting ACM to 
agree to publish given this preexisting license than they would given 
Harvard's "any and all rights" blanket requirement.  Authors who wish to 
can of course also license their works under a more liberal license such as 
CC-BY-SA.  Similarly, if a publisher does not object we'd of course rather 
get the publisher's version for deposit instead of or in addition to the 
author's final version.

Our expectation is that we will develop an implementation of this policy 
that includes a blanket license signed by each faculty member as part of 
their regular contract renewal (to meet the "in writing" requirements of 17 
USC 205(d)), plus suggestions for how to negotiate with publishers.  We 
believe that in most cases no addendum to publishing contracts is needed, 
but in cases where such an addendum is needed the resolution puts the 
author in a stronger bargaining position.

JQ Johnson
Director, Scholarly Communications and Instructional Support
University of Oregon Libraries
1299 University of Oregon          T: 541-346-1746; F: -3485
Eugene, OR  97403-1299             email: 
<mailto:jqj at uoregon.edu>jqj at uoregon.edu
http://libweb.uoregon.edu          office: 115F Knight Library

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