Penn State Librarians Approve Open Access Policy for Scholarly Work

UPDATE: On April 28, 2015 the Penn St. University Faculty Senate approved the OA policy. Details here.
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Original Post From March 18, 2015.
From Penn State University:

Penn State University Libraries faculty voted recently to embrace open access principles when publishing their scholarly articles. The Open Access Policy, passed into legislation at the Feb. 11, 2015, Library Faculty Organization meeting, preserves the right of library faculty to publish where they wish, but encourages authors to take advantage of open access opportunities whenever feasible.
An underlying principle of open access is to make scholarly output available at no cost to readers. In addition to the proliferation of reputable and high quality open access journals, many traditional publishers are amenable to authors making a version of their articles accessible online, either at the time of formal publication, or following an embargo period.
“As librarians, we are often the ones talking about open access and encouraging faculty to share their scholarly work with a wider audience of readers, whether through reputable open access journals or trusted repositories. Now, library faculty have made a commitment to distribute our own professional and scholarly articles using these same practices,” said Penn State Mont Alto librarian Tom Reinsfelder. “Plus, open access has been shown to help authors achieve greater recognition and impact through increased readership and citations, while also maintaining the traditional peer review process,” he added.
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Dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications Barbara I. Dewey lauds the new policy. “This commitment to open access that our librarians have made will enable their scholarly work to be shared more widely. Ultimately, the open access dissemination of their research findings will lead to Penn State librarians making an even greater contribution to librarianship, information literacy, and related fields than ever before.”
Penn State Libraries faculty join their colleagues at other institutions including Columbia, Arizona State, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Oregon State, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest, and the University of Northern Colorado, who have all voted to support the principles of open access for their scholarly work.

Direct to Full Text of Announcement
See Also: Direct to ScholarSphere (PSU’s Institutional Repository)

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Libraries, Open Access, Publishing, Scholarly Communications