Scholarly Communication at Texas A&M

Over the past two years, the open access (OA) movement in the United States has gained momentum with the adoption of campus-wide deposit mandates at several prominent institutions (Harvard, MIT, Univ. Kansas, Trinity University and Oberlin College). Yesterday, Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida became the sixth member of this group when the Arts and Sciences Faculty unanimously approved an institutional deposit mandate. Under this new policy, all members of the Rollins Faculty will deposit a copy of their peer-reviewed articles in the institution’s digital repository, Rollins Scholarship Online. These digital reprints will not be released for public access until the article has been formally published in the journal of the author’s choice.

Following the models of the other campus OA mandates, Rollins faculty have agreed to grant to their institution nonexclusive permission to make available the final, peer-reviewed, manuscript version accepted for publication of his or her scholarly articles. Faculty concerned with publishing pressures (e.g., tenure expectations) or facing unanticipated circumstances may request a waiver, or “opt out,” of the institutional license for a given article.

In sharing the news of their new open access policy, Rollins officials credited faculty advocates for their excellent in work in championing the importance of a campus-wide mandate. Dr. Thom Moore, Physics Professor, serves as Chair of the Faculty’s Professional Standards Committee and as Director of the school’s Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Program. Dr. Claire Strom, History Professor, is Editor of the journal “Agricultural History”.

In addition to the important leadership demonstrated by these faculty, the entire Rollins community actively contributed to campus OA efforts through awareness-raising activities and programs on various issues of scholarly communication. The campus publishes its own Open Access journal, Rollins Undergraduate Research Journal. Through the Scholar-In-Residence Program, the campus hosted Dr. Peter Suber, leading advocate of the Open Access Movement for scholarly publication, who presented “Open Access: Implications for the Future of Scholarly Communications” and “Open Access and Libraries: A Roundtable discussion.” The college library published a piece on “Open Access: What is it and why should you care?” in their newsletter.

Additional information and news about the Rollins Open Access policy is avialable via the Library Director’s blog.

Authors interested in posting their own scholarly or scientific articles online for free access have a powerful (and growing!) tool to discover publishers’ policies on open access archiving. The RoMEO database (short for “Rights MEtadata for Open archiving”) compiles information about the permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement. The number of publishers represented in RoMEO just passed the 700 mark and spans an extensive, worldwide list, from the very large (Elsevier) to the small (New Zealand Nurses Organisation).

Each journal record in RoMEO displays a color code to classify the publisher’s archiving policies and inform authors of what can be done with their articles. The coding system differentiates between two versions of the article:

1. Pre-prints, representing the first draft of the article, before peer-review has been applied;
2. Post-prints, the revised version of the paper after peer-review. Post-prints have the same content as the final version of the article, as published in the journal but do not reflect the publisher’s final type-setting and formatting.

With either version, authors typically cannot use the publisher-generated PDF file. Rather, they must make their own .pdf versions for submission to a repository.

The color-coding system used in the RoMEO database follows this scheme:

• Green = can archive pre-print and post-print
• Blue = can archive post-print
• Yellow = can archive pre-print
• White = archiving not formally supported

Note that RoMEO’s color-coding system does not include “gold”, a term sometimes used in open access parlance to describe open access publishers where all versions of an article may be freely shared online. RoMEO treats OA journals as green.

Of the 704 publishers included in the RoMEO database at present, 63% formally allow some form of self-archiving. Among these, 198 (28%) are green; 173 are blue (25%); and 72 (18%) are yellow. (source: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/statistics.php)

The RoMEO database is maintained by the SHERPA Project (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research, Preservation and Access) and generously funded by the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

The Oberlin College General Faculty unanimously endorsed on November 18 a resolution to make their scholarly articles openly accessible on the Internet. As a result of the measure, the rich scholarly output of the Oberlin faculty will become available to a much broader national and international audience. The Oberlin resolution is similar to policies passed at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Kansas, and Trinity University. (more…)

The Office of the Provost, The Texas A&M University Libraries, The Texas A&M University Press, and the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research sponsored “The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age,” a symposium on Scholarly Communication in February 2009. (more…)

The faculty senate, Provost, and Chancellor of the University of Kansas approved a policy that requires faculty to grant permission to the university to make a copy of their scholarly journal articles available in the open access repository, KU ScholarWorks. This is the first such policy implemented at a US public institution. MIT implemented a similar policy in March of this year, and several universities in the US have departmental open access policies. (more…)