University of Illinois at Trustees Approve Open Access Plan

From the Associated Press:

University of Illinois trustees have approved a plan to provide open access to research published by university faculty and others.
The vote Thursday comes three years after the passage of a 2013 state law requiring public universities to make their research available to the public.

From The News-Gazette (Champaign, IL)

The 2013 state law required the university to create a task force to develop an open access policy. The UI’s task force was chaired by John Wilkin, dean of the University Library at the Urbana campus, and included legal staff, faculty members from a variety of academic fields, and representatives from the publishing world, he said. A draft was drawn up by the University Senates Conference, a faculty advisory group, then completed by the task force and reviewed by all three campus senates, he said.
The policy applies to all scholarly articles produced by UI tenure-system faculty and academic administrators, and gives the university license to make them “widely and freely available.”
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“When we lower the barriers in this way, we get standard academic research and we get the populace looking at important things in their lives, including cancer-related research or divorce,” Wilkin said. “That’s what I like about this.
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A new website, created by library Professor Aaron McCollough, will have a guide to the new policy and links to the IDEALS site, which will serve as the repository for all research articles.

Read the Complete Article
Direct to U. of Illinois IDEALS (Open Repository)
See Also: Additional Info and Documents via Scholarly Communication and Publishing, U. of Illinois University Library (UIUC)
Includes link to 2013 State Law.
See Also: UI Approves Open Access (via The Daily Illini) (November 11, 2015)

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing