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.

Scholarly Communication refers to the system through which research and scholarly works are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. It is a shared system of research and scholarship, and stakeholders in the system include researchers, scholarly societies, publishers, university administrators, funding agencies, and libraries. The system is undergoing profound changes, with lasting impact on how the results of research and scholarship are shared.

Scholarly communication issues are complex, and it is difficult to keep up with even the issues most relevant to us in our roles as researchers and instructors. Therefore, Texas A&M Univerity Libraries (specifically, Digital Services and Scholarly Communication) have started this blog to highlight scholarly communication news of particular interest to the Texas A&M research community