Trinity College Dublin has adopted an open access policy.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
In a move aimed at broadening access to its research and scholarship, Trinity College Dublin has adopted a policy to make its scholarly articles available to the public for free and open online access. The new policy confirms Trinity's commitment to disseminating its research outputs and scholarship as widely as possible. This move places Trinity at the forefront of academic institutions worldwide that are pioneering the move to Open Access.
Trinity's Dean of Research, Dr David Lloyd said: "Knowledge must be accessible widely if its benefits are to impact on society. Trinity is proud to make the work of our world class researchers and scholars available on open access. This policy means that the institutional supports will be in place to assist our researchers in making their work freely available.”
Under the new policy, faculty authors give TCD nonexclusive permission to disseminate their journal articles and other scholarly publications for open access through TARA, Trinity's Access to Research Archive. The policy covers all scholarly articles, peer reviewed conference papers, reports and TCD research theses. The deposit of books, book chapters and datasets associated with published research is strongly encouraged.
TCD's Open Access policy is the first such policy adopted by an Irish university and is the result of an ongoing partnership between TCD Library and its Faculty to capture the intellectual outputs of the University, facilitate access to them via the Web and maintain and preserve that access into the future. TCD's resolution is similar to those adopted by the universities of Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, but differs from those policies in that it does not require faculty members to retain copyright to their publications. Instead, it works within the boundaries of scholarly publishers' copyright policies (up to 95% of these publishers allow authors to make some version of their papers freely accessible).
The new policy was approved unanimously at Trinity's recent Research Committee meeting and will take immediate effect.
Open Access policies have been adopted by over 96 universities worldwide and 46 research funding councils. Major research funders such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, the European Research Council and all UK research funding councils have mandated Open Access, as have almost all Irish funders (such as the Irish Research Council for Science Engineering and Technology (IRCSET), Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Higher Education Authority (HEA)). Last year, Dublin Institute of Technology became the first Irish Higher Education Institution to adopt an Open Access policy.
Here's an excerpt from the policy:
To assist the University in providing Open Access to all scholarly papers published by its members of staff and research students, each staff member and research student will provide, immediately upon acceptance for publication, an electronic copy of the final peer-reviewed draft of each article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost's Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost's Office. This can be done either by depositing it directly in TARA via the Research Support System or by emailing it to the Library to be deposited in our open access institutional repository on the author's behalf. Metadata will be made publicly available immediately; open access to the full text paper will be available as soon as is practicable, and not later than six months after publication. Embargos will be applied as necessary.
In order to support our researchers to comply with funders' Open Access mandates and in keeping with College's Information Systems Policy Guidelines and its requirement to reduce duplication of the creation of the same data, when metadata and papers are deposited in TARA the Library will undertake to assist with the deposit and/or enable harvesting of scholarly publications to other repositories (eg PubMed Central) as required by funders such as NIH, Wellcome Trust, SFI (life sciences), and HRB. Compliance with this policy automatically confers compliance with the IRCSET, HEA, European Research Council and SFI mandates.
The policy will apply to all scholarly articles, peer reviewed conference papers, reports and TCD research theses written while the person is a member of staff or a research student except for any publications completed before the adoption of this policy. The deposit of books, book chapters and datasets associated with published research is strongly encouraged. The Library will undertake to develop and monitor a plan for a service or mechanism that will render compliance with this policy as convenient for our researchers as possible.
