Don’t just look inside on Amazon — get Twelve Years a Slave for free from archive.org!
This just in from LaGuardia Community College, in honor of Open Access Week 2013:
LaGuardia’s library has 28 older model e-book readers (Sony Reader Touch PRS-600) that have been used with specific classes in past semesters. The library is now making these e-book readers available to the college community. The readers are old devices (no wireless, no extra features, b&w screen) but work fine for just reading e-books. They can be checked out for 3 weeks just like a print book.
The Sony Readers are pre-loaded with 25 open access and public domain books ranging from recent novels by Cory Doctorow to Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (read it before/after seeing the movie!) to the Works of Edgar Allan Poe (great for Halloween!) — here is the complete list of titles.
If you’re not at LaGuardia Community College, that doesn’t mean you can’t read these books. They’re open access, so of course you can read them (see the list of titles for links to the full text) — you’ll just have to read them on your own device.
Last week I reported with envy on the University of California’s new open access policy and the sample policy recommended (and employed!) by Harvard. Those are two strong open access policies by two of the most influential academic institutions in the country. But what’s the bigger picture? How many universities have such policies? Are Harvard and UC outliers, or is there a real trend developing?
Thanks to ROARMAP — the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies — we can answer these questions. According to ROARMAP, there are 120 open access policies in the United States. Some of those are funder policies (e.g., NIH), and some are specific to a certain college or university department (e.g., Stanford University School of Education), but many are college- or university-wide policies that apply to all faculty at that institution.
The institution-wide policies range in strength from urgings (e.g., Case Western Reserve University, Cornell University, and University of Pennsylvania) to automatic license-granting policies — i.e., the style of policy made famous by Harvard and now in effect across the entire University of California system. These Harvard-style policies are the effective ones, the ones that work at making a very large percentage of faculty’s scholarly articles open access. Faculty can opt out of these policies for specific articles, but if they don’t, the policy is in effect. This is what I dream of for CUNY. So let’s look at who else has a policy like this (click a link for more information about the policy):
Amherst College
Bucknell University
Duke University
Emory University
Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences (and a bunch of other Harvard schools, too)
Lafayette College
MIT
Oberlin College
Oregon State University
Princeton University
Rice University
Rollins College
Rutgers University
The College of Wooster
Trinity University
University of California (all 10 UC universities)
University of Hawaii-Manoa
University of Kansas
University of Massachusetts Medical School
University of North Texas
University of Rhode Island
Utah State University
Wellesley College
I may have missed some, and there may be some mandatory policies that aren’t listed in ROARMAP, but that’s already 23 colleges and universities with institution-wide Harvard-style policies.
If we look beyond the United States, the list gets longer: Concordia University, Trinity College Dublin, University of Lisbon, and many, many others.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there are 4,599 degree-granting institutions of higher education in the U.S., so clearly Harvard-style open access policies are not yet the norm. But that list of 23 is impressive. Any time a cluster of schools that includes Harvard, MIT, University of California, Duke, Emory, Princeton, Rice, and Rutgers embraces something, it’s probably worth paying attention to that thing.
They’re embracing open access, and doing so with strong policies to make sure faculty articles become open access. CUNY, let’s pay attention.
We looked last week at how Emerald (perhaps inspired by the problematic new RCUK open access policy) changed its self-archiving policies, becoming a less sparkling green OA publisher. Alas, Springer also recently changed its self-archiving for the worse (from the perspective of authors and readers), dulling its OA sparkle as a result.
Springer’s new policy says that authors may make the post-refereed versions of their articles available immediately on their personal websites but must wait a year before making them available in repositories. This embargo is nothing new with respect to subject repositories — Springer’s previous policy required a year-long embargo for subject repositories. But it is new for institutional repositories — Springer used to allow articles to appear immediately there. This change to a year-long embargo for institutional repositories makes self-archiving harder and more confusing and thus less likely to be attempted. So that’s bad. And in addition to being a bad change, it’s arguably a nonsensical change.
Consider institutional repositories on the Digital Commons platform. There’s a Digital Commons add-on called SelectedWorks that creates personal homepages for repository contributors. Are they personal webpages? Yes. Are they part of an institutional repository? Yes. So there goes that distinction.
Even for institutional repositories on other platforms, the distinction isn’t so clear. OK, sure, the institutional repository and personal homepages are probably on different servers. But the institutional repository is in some ways just an extension of those homepages, a place that the homepages link to. The School of Electronics and Computer Science of the University of Southampton wisely chose to be explicit about the continuousness of these spaces in its open access policy:
3v. Copyright agreements may state that eprints can be archived on your personal homepage. As far as publishers are concerned, the EPrint Archive is a part of the Department’s infrastructure for your personal homepage.
In short, just like Emerald, Springer wants us to believe that two things are mutually exclusive and incompatible, even though they aren’t. Emerald wants us to believe that voluntary and mandated self-archiving are mutually exclusive, which is obviously untrue. (After all, it’s people who support and practice self-archiving who passed all the mandatory self-archiving policies at universities around the world!) And Springer wants us to believe that personal websites and institutional repositories are mutually exclusive. That might initially sound like a reasonable distinction, but it’s confused. And, of course, confusing.
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