Open Access

• What is Open Access? “free availability on the public internet, permitting any users

to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited" (Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read )

Open Access Policies at Universities

• Since 2003, more than 135 institutions have implemented open-access mandates for research publications– Harvard, Duke, MIT, Princeton, Emory, University of

Virginia, among others

• Proposal: implement an open access policy at Rice, using Rice’s Digital Scholarship Archive to archive and access faculty publications

Advantages

• Free flow of information• Discoverable by search engines• Rank highly in Google Scholar searches• Increased reader access may increase

frequency of citations

Rice’s Copyright Policy

While Rice faculty members own their copyright, Rice retains the right to use these works, “on a royalty-free basis solely for the University’s education, teaching and research activities” (Policy No. 334 - Copyright - see link in Faculty Handbook)

Existing Open Access Mandates

Many Rice faculty already comply with open-access mandates from funding bodies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Proposed Rice Open Access Policy

• An electronic version of the final author’s version of scholarly publications written while a faculty member at Rice will be provided for public access in the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive.

• This requirement can be waived upon written notification by the author (OPT-OUT provision)