Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas has adopted an open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Trinity University's faculty members today endorsed a measure to allow them to bypass some publication restrictions while sharing their scholarly research with the broader academic community.

Trinity becomes the first small, primarily undergraduate liberal arts institution to pass such a measure, known as Open Access. To date, the only U.S. universities to implement such policies are Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Kansas. Diane Graves, Trinity University Librarian, professor, and chair of the Faculty Senate, said she hoped the Trinity model would be emulated by others in higher education.

"Members of Trinity's faculty have been studying imbalances in the scholarly communication system for several years now," Professor Graves said. "I am proud that the faculty as a whole came together to support change toward a more sustainable and equitable model for access to their scholarly output. My hope is that other institutions will see the broad range of universities that have taken this action – from Harvard, to the University of Kansas, to Trinity – and choose to join us." . . .

The new Open Access policy also would enable Trinity professors to post the author's version of the article in a freely-accessible digital repository. Such a repository already exists as part of the Liberal Arts Scholarly Repository, a collaboration among Trinity and other private liberal arts colleges, including Carleton College, Bucknell University, Grinnell College, University of Richmond, St. Lawrence University, and Whitman College. . . .

Trinity's Faculty Senate approved the proposal in late September. The vote by the full faculty on Friday, Oct. 23 was taken at an assembly during International Open Access Week.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Open Access, Self-Archiving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.