Introduction
The University open access policy provides the public the benefit of open access dissemination of University of Delaware scholarship. It supports the faculty by making their work more available, and fostering greater impact, the retention of distribution rights, and preservation.
Open Access Policy: Faculty Handbook Policy 4.2.15
The faculty of the University of Delaware is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible and thus the faculty adopts the following policy:
Each faculty member grants to the University of Delaware permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. More specifically, each faculty member grants to the University of Delaware a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of their scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy applies to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the faculty, except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy.
The University will automatically waive application of the license for a particular article or delay access for a specified period of time upon express direction by a faculty member or their designee.
Provision of each article shall be as convenient as possible for faculty. Each faculty member will, upon request, provide an electronic copy of the author’s final version of each article to the University of Delaware Library in an appropriate format.
The University of Delaware Library will make the articles available to the public in an open access repository, UDSpace or its successor. The policy will be reviewed during the 2018-2019 academic year, and a report on utilization and dissemination will be presented to the Faculty Senate at that time.
The text of this policy was adapted from the model policy language provide by the Harvard Office of Scholarly Communication https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/modelpolicy, March 2015.
News
Why Unpaywall will be a game-changer
Recently, a new tool has come out, from the makers of OADOI and ImpactStory, that allows users to ‘jump the paywall’ and access research articles for free. It’s called Unpaywall, and it works by using information contained within papers, such as its DOI, to find legally archived versions of papers (of which there are multiple usually, like pre-peer review, post-peer review but pre-typesetting etc.) from across the Web, and deliver them straight to you. The interface is fairly simple, as it exists on pretty much any webpage that links to a research paper, with a colour code letting you know whether a version is available for free or not. Click away and you’re done, simples.
It leverages what is known as ‘green open access’, or self-archiving, something which is becoming way more common as some research funders mandate it as part of an OA policy, and as we move generally as a research culture from being closed and selfish (for whatever reason) to one of open sharing. more
Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) was launched on April 6th. It “aims to allow anyone to access science papers’ reference lists and to build analytical services on top of those raw data.” Here are a few stories about this initiative:
- Initiative aims to break science’s citation paywall Nature News & Comment
- Setting your cites on open eLife and PLOS
- How we know what we know: The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) helps unlock millions of connections between scholarly research Wikimedia
- Tearing Down Science’s Citation Paywall, One Link at a Time Wired
San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)
— BioMed Central and SpringerOpen sign the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
— Nature journals support the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
Several individuals, universities, publishers, funding agencies and other organizations have signed this declaration since Dec. 2012 saying that they will not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion,or funding decisions.
SPARC Launches New Resource for Understanding, Comparing Federal Article Sharing Requirements
SPARC is pleased to release a new, integrated resource for tracking, comparing, and understanding U.S. federal agencies’ article and data sharing policies. This free tool combines a new analysis of federal public access plans for sharing peer-reviewed research articles with the federal data sharing policy resource that SPARC launched earlier this year in partnership with Johns Hopkins University Libraries. The resource is available at researchsharing.sparcopen.org
This integrated policy resource can be used by researchers, librarians, policy makers, and other stakeholders to explore and compare agency requirements for sharing articles and data. The new article-sharing analysis provides a tool for tracking practical information that can be used by active or prospective grant awardees to understand when, how, and where they need to make their manuscripts accessible, including links to each agency’s submission portal. As with the data-sharing resource, it will be updated as additional federal agency plans are released and analyzed and as current plans are revised.
This resource is openly available at researchsharing.sparcopen.org under a CC0 waiver. Additionally, the entire dataset of the policy analyses can be downloaded without restriction from the site under the same terms.
The Federal Trade Commission has charged the publisher of hundreds of purported online academic journals with deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars.
The FTC’s complaint alleges that OMICS Group, Inc., along with two affiliated companies and their president and director, Srinubabu Gedela, claim that their journals follow rigorous peer-review practices and have editorial boards made up of prominent academics. In reality, many articles are published with little to no peer review and numerous individuals represented to be editors have not agreed to be affiliated with the journals…
Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No
A Reboot of the Legendary Physics Site arXiv Could Shape Open Science26 May 2016. An article about arXiv appeared in a recent issue of Wired: http://www.wired.com/2016/05/legendary-sites-reboot-shape-future-open-science/
Researchers Are Pushing Back Against Elsevier’s Open-Access Publishing Fees – The Atlantic
Academics Want You to Read Their Work for Free by Jane C. Hu in The Atlantic, January 26, 2016. Publishing an open-access paper in a journal can be prohibitively expensive. Some researchers are drumming up support for a movement to change that.
Biden puts data sharing at center of drive to cure cancer – FierceBiotechIT
“Vice President Joe Biden has put improved data sharing at the center of a government-led initiative to cure cancer. The plan is to create conditions that usher improved drugs to market by working with tech companies to pull down data silos while boosting the resources available to public and private research teams. Biden set out his thinking in a blog post…”
Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly to Internet – The New York Times 
“On Feb. 29, Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University became the third Nobel Prize laureate biologist in a month to do something long considered taboo among biomedical researchers: She posted a report of her recent discoveries to a publicly accessible website, bioRxiv, before submitting it to a scholarly journal to review for ‘official’ publication …”
Making the Choice: Open Access vs. Traditional Journals by Sarah Conte
on Mon, 12/01/2015
“In modern society, research is disseminated through many venues, including social media sites, blogs, Twitter, and open access (OA) scholarly journals that are freely available to anyone with Internet access. As opposed to traditional journals, which often charge readers hefty fees to access journal content, OA journals provide content for free on the web and charge researchers to publish their findings. Although the idea of a journal that is freely available to the public…”