On March 18, the Academic Council at Duke University unanimously adopted an Open Access policy for scholarly articles written by the Duke faculty. The policy, developed by the Digital Futures Taskforce comprising representatives from the University faculty, Libraries and Press, was modeled after similar policies adopted by Harvard, MIT, and the University of Kansas. The policy provides the legal basis for Duke to provide free Web access to, and preserve for the long-term, the work of its scholars in a permanent digital repository.

According to Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke and a member of the provost-appointed Digital Futures Taskforce that developed the policy,

We were all surprised to find that the idea of open access itself was fairly uncontroversial. Most of the difficult challenges we faced had to do with the process that will be implemented for faculty to make their works available in a repository, not the concept of openness. Now we are faced with developing procedures and systems that will be easy and intuitive for faculty, which may be the greatest challenge yet. Our faculty have told us, in essence, that if we build it they will come, as long as we build it well (Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications@Duke Blog, “Open Access at Duke” posted March 19, 2010. .

The text of the Duke Open Access Policy, along with a detailed FAQ document, are available in DukeSpace, the University’s online digital repository.

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