Open access: Advice on working with faculty senates

Abstract

Tim Hackman’s October 2009 Scholarly Communication column, “What’s the op-posite of a pyrrhic victory?,” discussed the failure of the University of Maryland to adopt an open access policy. Responding to the advice in Hackman’s piece, this column offers some suggestions on the process of propos-ing a policy at your institution. This column assumes the goal of a bind-ing open access policy, like those adopted recently at Harvard1 and MIT2 (but see cave-ats below). In general, I won’t discuss the actual workings of the policy here. For more information on crafting the policy itself, see SPARC’s campus policy resources.