Institutional support for open access scholarship

The KU faculty senate first endorsed open access in a March 2005 resolution, which called upon faculty and departments to seek amendments to copyright transfer forms and to deposit articles in KU ScholarWorks or other open repositories.3 The resolution further encouraged faculty to become knowledgeable about journal business practices, encouraged administration and departments to provide incentives to support sustainable models of scholarly communication, and called upon the university libraries to provide resources to help faculty understand their options. Then provost, David Shulenburger, announced the resolution in a memo to faculty4 with the admonition that because “the price and volume of scholarly literature far outstrip the capacity of the KU library (or any university library) to acquire all important material, we cannot take for granted the accessibility of scholarly literature.” Shulenburger was an early and influential leader in promoting open access to scholarship and illuminating the potential consequence of a constricted gateway to scholarship through the library budget. Notably, KU administrators since Shulenburger have also been supportive of faculty efforts to build momentum for open access scholarship and accompanying services.

KU has enjoyed a rich institutional history of supporting open access through various initiatives. KU was a founding partner in the open access collaboration at the tail end of the 1990s that became BioONE.5 KU libraries was an early U.S. signatory of the high-energy physics open access initiative, SCOAP3,6 and also served as a campus partner in developing support and resources for NIH open access compliance. The libraries are the digital home for several open access journals through the Journals@KU digital publishing program. Together institutional leadership, faculty, and libraries have invested nearly 15 years in the strategies for open access and these have contributed to an environment ripe for the successful development of a university-wide approach to sharing KU scholarship openly with the world.

Leadership by faculty for faculty

The groundwork for implementing KU’s open access repository extends back to 2003, when early adopters were recruited to test and provide feedback on the first KU repository interface. A series of conversations with selected faculty, deans, and research center directors took place concerning the implications of open access and key policy questions.7 As KU ScholarWorks moved from a concept and test environment into full service at the university, a faculty advisory group formed and met with library and technology leadership.

In September 2008, a specific charge was given to the Research Committee of the Faculty Senate, and a small ad hoc committee led by distinguished professor Town Peterson was appointed to “Develop a policy designed to promote open access to KU scholarship. The policy would outline a process to collect, preserve, and disseminate scholarly articles of KU faculty through KU ScholarWorks.”8 The ad hoc committee developed the first policy passed by the senate. Between passage of the first policy in 2009, and the passage of final revisions in 2010, a program of outreach to faculty to ensure broad understanding and discussion of the policy and plan for implementation became the work of an implementation task force chaired by scholarly communication librarian, Ada Emmett.

Engagement of faculty

Over the course of about nine months, the implementation task force met with 230 faculty through departmental and open brownbag meetings and gathered many more comments by e-mail, providing updated information and feedback to the faculty senate along the way.9

Even with the institutional history and focus on open access scholarship over many years at KU, the faculty was not universally familiar with the principles behind such a policy, and the tireless efforts and excellent leadership of Emmett, Peterson, and the task force represented a crucial effort to win the hearts and minds of faculty through patient and open discussion. Faculty articulated a number of concerns that needed to be addressed with factual information and a broad understanding of how faculty in various disciplines conduct research and publish journal literature. These concerns can be generalized as:

• Is the university assuming my copyright and taking my rights away?
• Doesn’t this policy damage academic freedom?
• Will this policy interfere with or duplicate my efforts to participate in other open access repositories, such as arcXive, PubMed, or SSRN?
• Can a faculty member opt out once and permanently decline participation?
• Will the KU open access policy force editors of small society journals to give away the assets upon which they depend for sustaining the society?
• Will open access diminish the value or the prestige of KU faculty scholarship?
• Won’t open access will damage or eliminate peer-review?
• Will departmental chairs be burdened with policing this policy and ensuring deposit?
• Why can’t nonfaculty researchers publish in KU ScholarWorks? (Nonfaculty researchers can deposit in KU ScholarWorks. The policy, however, is specific to peer-reviewed journal articles of faculty.)

Emmett and Peterson were an effective faculty duo leading efforts to address these concerns and champion open access. They presided over a series of meetings with departments and open meetings of faculty, providing resources and discussion points to address the issues. They developed resources that included a list of frequently asked questions with answers, slide show presentations, and a Web site with regular communications on progress for the campus. Equally important, they not only led the implementation task force, which consisted of representatives from the faculty, administration, and campus IT, but they were also able to galvanize the task force members into an effective team able to speak comfortably and knowledgeably about the issues. If there is a lesson learned, it is the value in identifying and supporting strong faculty leadership (including librarians) who can effectively move policy from the theoretical level to real discussion of the very pragmatic concerns of faculty.

In hindsight, KU faculty attitudes about research, scholarship, and open access, gathered both anecdotally and in a formal survey, closely mirrored recently published findings of faculty attitudes found through other studies.10 Beyond the immediate and sometimes personal concerns that faculty expressed about open access, there was clearly tension centered around the perception that open access might diminish the prestige and scholarly value of publication within systems of open access. While faculty stated their natural desire to see their research made widely available and cited, they also valued publication in the premier literature of their discipline. Tenure-seeking faculty were necessarily concerned that their publications be aligned with departmental promotion and tenure requirements. Of lesser interest for faculty was the pressure of closed access scholarship on the library budget. Arguments about the diminishing capacity of libraries to make scholarly journals available within the economic constraints of closed access systems may be powerful arguments for overhaul of scholarly communication in speaking to librarians and university leaders, but they were less tangible concepts for most faculty.

The very positive advantages of open access scholarship from a faculty perspective were reflected in a recent quote by KU Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Department Chair Marc Greenberg:

In our area, we typically publish in journals and anthologies that have a small specialist readership, but often what we have to say is of wider interest to historians, literary scholars, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists. Our works are now read more widely in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, as well as places we would not normally expect to be read, from Albania to Zimbabwe not to mention the U.S., where we have the highest number of hits.One of our faculty received an invitation to give a distinguished guest lecture in Louisiana after an administrator (from a different field) had viewed her KU ScholarWorks piece on Russian culture. Recently I found my own work cited by scholars in Japan, Germany, and Norway, and I have received e-mail from scholars in Iran, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, and Indonesia responding to my work. I attribute much of this to the availability of my work through open access.11

Moving beyond policy adoption

As we now begin to move beyond policy development and the initial planning for open access implementation, two advisory groups, serving at the administrative and operational levels of the organization, will consider a number of strategic and pragmatic issues. Such issues include fostering the principles of open access beyond peer-reviewed journal articles as well as considering how to measure the impact of open access as the repository is more fully populated with all that KU can offer freely from its research endeavors.

At the upper level of university administration, an executive steering team, led by the dean of libraries, will be assembled to ensure that our open access strategies are aligned with KU’s priorities for advancing research, teaching, and service. A faculty advisory group will also be formed with some continuing members from the initial policy implementation task force. They will focus on advancing open access principles and ensuring that repository services are easily integrated with the conduct of faculty research so that KU constructs a meaningful and enduring corpus of scholarship. In addition to journal articles, KU ScholarWorks holds monographs, conference proceedings, theses and dissertations, and interviews and oral histories. It is slowly expanding to include data sets. Expansion requires consulting and support services for faculty as well as technologies for easy deposit of newer forms of research along with accompanying tools for analysis and interpretation or other contextual artifacts.

At KU, as at other universities, the development and debate of an institutional open access policy has created a timely opportunity for discussion of the future of faculty scholarship. More experience and monitoring of open access at the institutional level will be required to know the extent to which such policy corresponds with actual success in opening up university research to the world. KU’s early resolution encouraging faculty open access deposit has now moved to a stronger mandate in the form of policy, albeit one that is generous in allowing faculty to waive participation. A similar move by NIH to move from encouragement to a mandate for open deposit makes it clear that encouragement alone may not suffice. It will be our challenge to mature KU’s early efforts into greater visibility of KU research through substantive growth in the rate of faculty deposit of peer-reviewed journal articles and through integration of the repository and the library role with the greater fabric of university management of research in its many forms.