Strategies for Success: Open Access Policies at North American Educational Institutions by Christine Fruin, Shan Sutton. College & Research Libraries, vol 77, no 4, 2016.

"The majority of the institutions with enacted policies reported a collaborative, collegial, and otherwise positive relationship between faculty and administration."

Most policies (86 percent in the Enacted Policy Group and 67 percent in the In Process Group) include language that grants automatic waivers to a faculty author on request without justification or explanation. In the majority of policies at institutions surveyed, the waiver is granted on a per-article basis, rather than a blanket waiver for all of a faculty member’s articles. In some cases, the waiver applies to both the nonexclusive license and the requirement to deposit into the institutional repository, while in others it applies to the license only and faculty members are still expected to deposit all of their article manuscripts."

Most policies (86 percent in the Enacted Policy Group and 67 percent in the In Process Group) include language that grants automatic waivers to a faculty author on request without justification or explanation. In the majority of policies at institutions surveyed, the waiver is granted on a per-article basis, rather than a blanket waiver for all of a faculty member’s articles. In some cases, the waiver applies to both the nonexclusive license and the requirement to deposit into the institutional repository, while in others it applies to the license only and faculty members are still expected to deposit all of their article manuscripts."

"Partnerships between academic libraries and faculty outside the library were also identified as a critical component of promoting the institutional policies across campus in advance of faculty votes. In all three respondent groups, the most common approach articulated by respondents was to assign responsibility for managing the promotion process to either the faculty senate library committee or a committee specifically formed to promote the policy. In some cases, the Provost’s office or the Office of Research was directly involved in policy promotion."

Reasons offered to faculty on why open access is important:

• Open access enables authors to retain more of their rights in their own work rather than assigning all rights to the publishers.

• Open access is a means of addressing the pricing crisis in subscription scholarly journals and combating the monopoly that a few publishers have on the dissemination of scholarship.

• Open access promotes access to research by anyone. It allows more people to benefit from scholarship, including the general public who may have an interest in or need for scholarly research.

• Open access allows faculty to not only be better researchers but also better educators. When professors can’t access the most recent research, they are deprived of the opportunity to bring that material into the classroom. With science advancing at an ever-increasing pace, it’s crucial that professors have access to cutting-edge research, so students’ education is not outdated before they even finish a course.

• Open access facilitates collaboration on new research. With access barriers removed, scientists and other researchers can share scholarship across borders and work together more efficiently to bring forth new ideas.

• Open access supports public access. A large body of scholarship is funded through public tax dollars, and the public should be allowed free and unburdened access to the research they help support.

• Scholarly research can be made open access through deposit in open access repositories 
  (green OA) or through publication in open access journals (gold OA). Publication of scholarly research in gold OA journals does not signify that the research is of lesser quality. Gold OA scholarly literature is not lesser quality than traditionally published scholarship. Much of the open access literature published via gold OA is subject to the same or more rigorous peer review as traditional toll access journals.

• Open access supports the institution’s land grant mission.

• Open access supports the institution’s education and/or research mission.

• Open access enables access to research by scholars at institutions that cannot afford access to the subscription-based journals in which the articles are published, especially those in non-Western countries.

• Open access to research outputs is becoming a standard requirement at many funding agencies.

Methods of promoting policy:

    Websites, including LibGuides
    Brochures
    In-person meetings with faculty, including open forums, brown bag sessions, and departmental visits
    Targeted e-mails
    Articles in library and other campus newsletters
    Open Access Week programming on campus

Faculty Concerns about open access:

• Complying with the policy will create a burden on faculty

• Concern that control of copyright being transferred to institution and that deposit in IR permits unauthorized use of works by others

• Belief that publishers will refuse work if author subject to an open access policy

• Belief that a mandatory policy is an act of institutional control or coercion

• Confusion about what types of works the policy applies to

• Belief that open access will hurt scholarly societies

• Belief that policy requires publication in open access journals

• Belief that open access infringes upon academic freedom

• Confusion of place of publication vs. requirement of deposit in the IR

• Requirement of multiple deposits where funder policy also requires deposit of work in an open access repository.

Responses to faculty concerns:

• No requirement to publish in an open access journal; article may be published in any scholarly journal

• Outline many benefits of depositing works in an institution repository

• Deposit assistance available

• Clarification that the final version of the peer reviewed manuscript, not the published version, should be deposited

• Copyright ownership is not transferred to the institution; rather, authors retain copyright and grant the institution a nonexclusive license

• Clarification that the policy only applies to scholarly articles published after policy’s effective date

• Waiver available if publisher refuses to publish on account of policy

• Waivers are available without proof or justification of need

• Faculty members may elect an embargo upon availability of their deposited works

• If work has been deposited in a funder mandated repository, it will be harvested by institution

• Library will track publication of articles and request manuscripts from faculty for deposit

• Faculty members have responsibility to deposit their works

Adopting and Implementing an Open Access Policy: The Library's Role. Brian Kern. The Serials Librarian 66 (2014): 1-4, p 196-203.

Alleghany College's Pelletier Library had a strong commitment to open source software, and an IR, and was just beginning to commit to promoting open access, when the College's Academic Support Committee noticed the issue. The committee learned that the college's guidelines for research funding didn't include paying open access fees and that many faculty had been paying them out of pocket. That Committee developed..."a rights retention policy with a permission mandate, a policy that assumes that fac­ulty authors will retain full rights to their work, and mandates that the authors give the library a copy, along with permission to host the work on the IR and the non-exclusive right to make the work openly available."  The policy only applied to peer reviewed articles written or contracted to be published since the date of the adoption of the policy. Before the faculty vote on the policy, the library's director held meet­ings with faculty and used the library's newsletter to explain and promote OA, arguing for OA as a way to change publishing models, reduce journal inflation, help the library, and increase public access to schol­arly content " However, it was primarily the Academic Support Committee that convinced faculty by arguing that the policy empowered faculty to protect their rights. The Provost signaled his support of the policy by matching the fundd the library planned to set aside for an open access fund to pay publisher's open access fees. Faculty are encouraged to negotiate an addendum to their contract to publish if the publisher requires an embargo. Implementation of the policy consists of a website and the IR. There is a waiver form form and a waiver is automatically granted regardless of the reason, and also a form to request payment of open access fees, and a form and program to generate a contract waivers eliminating embargos and other restrictions. If the author has a waiver or doesn't wish to participate, their works are still placed in the IR but access is closed.

Engaged Citizenship through Campus-Level Democratic Processes: A Librarian and Graduate Student Collaboration on Open Access Policy Adoption by Melissa Cantrell and Andrew Johnson, Journal of Librarianship & Scholarly Communication, 2018 Special Issue, Vol 6, p 1-17. 

Abstract: 

INTRODUCTION While faculty votes to establish open access (OA) policies leverage one particular campus level democratic mechanism in the name of advancing scholarly communication, other processes, including student government actions, can also play significant roles in OA policy adoption and related efforts. As early career researchers, graduate students are particularly well-poised to engage with campus-level democratic institutions in order to bring about change in scholarly communication.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM This case study details a multi-year collaboration between librarians and graduate students at the University of Colorado Boulder aimed at the development and adoption of a campus OA policy. Librarians and graduate students worked together to plan for and sustain momentum throughout the process of building formal support for the policy through student government and faculty assembly resolutions, drafting policy language, and shepherding the proposed policy through numerous meetings and committees all the way up to and including its formal adoption. This  collaboration through engaged citizenship at the campus level also led to a number of unintended benefits to both librarians and graduate students involved.

NEXT STEPS AND CONCLUSIONS Ultimately, the CU Boulder collaboration between librarians and graduate students led to significant scholarly communication achievements largely through the utilization of campus-level democratic processes. The case study concludes with a look at next steps for implementing the OA policy across campus as well as a discussion of the labor involved in such efforts, including implications for graduate student involvement in scholarly communication initiatives.

Graduate students have a strong interest in greater and more equitable access to info. Institutions where graduate students in conjunction with libraries have been involved  in influencing an open access policy through democratic processes include the University of Washington, MIT, the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and the University of Colorado Boulder. "In each example, however, democratic methods and venues were used in order to strengthen or bring forth policies that advance core principles of scholarly communication. In addition, a key characteristic of the engaged citizenship model for open access policy advocacy demonstrated in these preceding examples is its grassroots, bottom-up nature."

CU Boulder Libraries formed a Scholarly Communication Working Group (SCWG). Grad student approached the library about open access. "SCWG members helped these students understand the economics of journal subscription costs by sharing information about the Libraries’ budget, and they introduced the students to mechanisms like campus OA policies and institutional repositories that could help make research produced at CU Boulder available to anyone with an internet connection." They partnered on Open Access Week. Then then drafted a student government resolution and got it passed. Both student groups passed it, and the library developed a unit wide policy as a test case for campus policy, which was voted on by library faculty and passed. Then they sent policy language for legal review. When presenting the policy to faculty, it was presented as a logical extension of the student resolutions in favor of OA and the will of the student body. The Librarian prepared fact sheets on OA that addressed common misconception to support the students. Librarians attended presentations to provide information and answer questions. Library sponsored grad student attendance at open access conferences.

XIa, Jingfeng, et. al. "A Review of Open Acess Self-Archiving Policies." Portal: Libraries and the Academy 12 (2021), no. 1, pp. 85-102.

Few policies mention a time limit for deposits. Many institutions mention specific items, e.g journal articles, conference proceedings, multi-media–some require the deposit of all items produced while employed and encourage negotiating with publishers.. Some institutions require both a citation and full text. Some institutions require that the work be copyright free, i.g. on  cc license. "Despite these successes, such a mandate effect is unpredictable. There are still poli-cies showing little or no visible impact on repository development, and different types of policies have varied levels of success."

Kipphut-Smith, Shannon. "Leading a Campus-Wide Conversation About Open Access." (2014) https://hdl.handle.net/1911/75897

This is entirely about policy implementation.

Smith, Kevin L. "Why open access? The policy environment and process on one university campus." Insights 25 (Nov. 2012), no. 3.

The Duke University Provost convened a "Digital Future Task Force," and in it's first year, that group focused on open access. The drafted a policy document and began attending many meetings with faculty. There were 3 broad areas of concern:

1. Is open access really the best option for all authors? This also included concern for publishers and especially small scholarly societies. 

2. Is a university-wide policy the best way to support open access? This focused on the differences across disciplines.

3. How would the policy be implemented? Faculty didn't want extra work either putting things in the repository or negotiating with publishers every time they published an article.

Faculty were told the majority of publishers allow self archiving and they've put this in their contracts themselves. Also, told them they wouldn't be expected to violate any agreements they signed. Also told them about the citation advantage of open access. Finally, discussed how open access makes research faster and more efficient. The waiver clause also calmed concerns. "We also had to distinguish between a waiver, which is automatically granted when requested by the faculty author, and the irrevocable nature of the license created by the policy, which prevents the license from being retracted by a subsequent holder of the copyright in any covered articles." They also used stories of problems caused by lack of access to research (examples are in article). "But the support for open access as such was very strong, and it was clearly based on the advantages that faculty authors saw in terms of visibility, citations, the speed of research and the possibility 
of interdisciplinary relationships that it might uncover. The public benefits, including availability to wholly unexpected readers, as well as less well-financed colleagues, were also of great importance. Finally, one researcher reported that an article he wrote that had attracted press attention got much better, more accurate reportage because it was openly available and so could be read in its entirety by the reporters who were writing about it. All of these factors lead to a unanimous vote." The remainder of the article covers implementation and is quite interesting. We often told our faculty that a further benefit of the policy was that it meant their research would show up in a Google search on their names ahead of their ‘Rate My Professor’ pages. NOTE: A great thing they did was add the OA policy to the faculty handbook.

Emmett, A; Stratton, J; Peterson, A.T; Church‐Duran, J; & Lorraine Haricombe. Toward Open Access: It takes a village. Library Adminstration  51:5-6, 1–23, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2011.589345.

University of Kansas's Faculty Senate charged the Faculty Research Committee to develop a policy for consideration. 

As noted in the SPARC & Science Commons White Paper, Open Doors and Open Minds: What Faculty Authors Can do to Ensure Open Access to Their Work Through Their Institution, a critical need exists for internal champions who are “willing to devote substantial time to building consensus among multiple stakeholders” (Thinh Nguyen et al., 2008x). The ad hoc committee designed a systematic approach to opening the lines of communication across campus.  As part of this effort, a web‐based survey was distributed to faculty to assess attitudes and knowledge about open access, and to gauge faculty awareness of, and interest in, an open access policy on the KU campus.   Two open meetings were also convened for the entire faculty and presentations were made to both FacEx and full faculty senate meetings.  This policy implemented the two critical elements of open access: required deposit in an institutional archive and it created an automatic license that attaches to the work before transfer of copyright to the publisher.  

    Hosted six “brown bag” lunches with faculty; one open meeting for all faculty;
    Arranged meetings with many academic departments;
    Prepared and presented progress reports to FacEx, Faculty Senate, Vice Provosts/Deans’
"Academic Council;” and Graduate Student’s Professional Association on campus;
    Held extended discussions with the Information Technology Unit and the KU Libraries to clarify their roles and resources needed.

“Early adopter” departments and individual faculty members were enlisted to test implementation ideas and processes and provide feedback to task force members.. 

Integrating open access materials into normal library operations requires additional staff, time, and effort.  Towards that end, a new staff member was hired to assist in the roll‐out and promotion of the services KU Libraries will provide to the campus community.  

To be successful it has been imperative to provide professional development opportunities for librarian liaisons in their new roles as open access partners. 

Biology Case study: Nevertheless, that “we have a problem” is indicated by the results of a recent informal survey in which 10 literature citations were sent to 50+ colleagues worldwide, to see who could obtain access to which citations. The results were quite simple—(1) no journal was universally accessible, with success rates ranging from 91% (Systematic Biology, Molecular Biology and Evolution) down to <45% (Journal of Mammalogy, Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology, Herpetologica); and (2) only 2 of 32 respondents (both in Europe) had access to all 10 publications. These results strongly suggest that the access problem is indeed a serious problem, with very real implications for readership of papers in this field. 

Faculty advocates at KU ultimately came to realize that open access policy passage and implementation is a journey, not an event. 

Do not use the words mandate or requirement when talking about the policy.

4 most frequent issues:

Time–don't ask them to submit themselves–have them sent to library.

Junior Faculty–effects on preparation for tenure given they are particularly time stressed.

Giving up rights–lack of understanding of difference between transferring copyright and granting a license.

Small society journals–small society depend on journals as a source of income and those journals might be affected by open access. Journals decide if their content can be self-archived. If the prices of the more exorbitantly priced journals goes down libraries can subscribe to more, so that the small society journals may have more subscribers.

Conditions for open access

You need faculty champions. They suggest an environmental scan on strength of support. Have repository. Library administration support is critical.

Mullen, L. B., & Otto, J.J. (2015). The Rutgers Open Access Policy: Implementation planning for success. Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries, 4, 207–217. https://doi.org/10.7282/T3FT8P32

The Rutger's Library Research Office proposed that he faculty senate form a committee to explore an open access policy. The Senate like the idea and proposed a group o f librarians meet with the Senate's Research Committee. They were quite positive about the idea, and a subgroup was formed that included 2 librarians, a faculty member, 2 deans, and a graduate student. The 2 Librarians led the committee. They gathered and distributed documents, proposed talking points and policy language, and drafted a background report on open access. They gauged buy in among various stakeholders. The grad student proposed that grad students also be covered by the policy. They also included data deposit in their policy.

"The subcommittee agreed that it must educate faculty, and that the librarians were most qualified to take the lead roles here as well. Together the group compiled a list of university leadership and stakeholders across all three campuses. The members of the Senate Subcommittee had the seniority, diversity, and familiarity with University structure to make them well suited for identifying these constituencies." The librarians prepared a 20 minute presentation. It was revised repeatedly between presentations based on new responses and questions. The draft policy was ran by university council, and discussed the policy with the group responsible for university policy. By the time the faculty senate voted, the presentations message had been carefully  honed and was approved. 

The honing of the presentation involved removing issues important to Librarians, and adding ones important to faculty: 

Added:

• Authors can publish in the journals of their choice, at no cost to them. T

• The policy applies only to works for which there’s no expectation of payment.

• The process will be quick and easy.

• Repository staff will take on any required rights research.

• The repository is crawled by Google.

• Opt-outs are available.

• Implementation will take some time.

• Further, the authors cited University-wide precedents, such as FRPAA support and the electronic thesis and dissertation mandate. 

Removed:

• focus on the library

• institutional repositories

• the serials crisis

Faculty want:

• Faculty are concerned about the availability of multiple versions, and want a link to the canonical
  version (publisher-branded pdf).

• Many want the ability to limit repository searches to peer-reviewed materials

• They like the option to link publications to their underlying data.

• They particularly appreciated the promise of permanence especially the ability to migrate their scholarship from declining and obsolete
  formats. 

"These conversations were a tremendous learning experience and always produced interesting food for thought. Presenting even for five minutes to important stakeholder groups allows the topic to “trickle down.” Creating a conversation that is accessible, appealing and based on a high level of knowledge that takes into account the complexities of open access allows people to “come along.” Certain topics elicited reaction, either good or bad, and all of that experience led to an improved presentation for the next time. This is a conversation that ideally percolates out into the institution with a carefully crafted and consistent message. Outreach and education about this complex topic requires active listening and the type of engagement with an audience that allows them to ask their tough questions or air disagreement with any perceived agenda in a free and open exchange. Moving an open access policy conversation forward requires the ability of the presenters to avoid being too simplistic or taking any
strident advocacy position."

"Because many scholars conflate open access with poor quality journal outlets or with an absence of peer review, they may wish to engage on those aspects. This is where librarians with scholarly communication expertise can use open access policy discussions to engage with faculty on many associated topics of interest. Dispelling myths, providing a friendly research backed discussion that addresses some misinformation while suggesting easy, staff-assisted faculty deposit workflows eases skepticism when it arises."

Enhanced their repository to meet faculty demands.

"A constant reminder that we will make open access happen “to the extent possible” is helpful."

"Covering the bases in terms of complementary areas of librarian expertise as it relates to various aspects of open access allows engagement with researchers in a very targeted and disciplinary manner. It is often necessary to answer tricky questions with a “tag team” approach. Scalability in the conversation will involve education of subject specialists and departmental liaisons about the open access policy so that they can engage their constituencies."

"For the researcher, it is often important to show a simple example using a traditionally published, easily recognized high impact journal in the disciplinary area about which you are talking. Using an example of a high impact journal that allows “green” OA is compelling, and demonstrating the Sherpa/RoMEO database journal in the field is also engaging."