At its meeting of April 14, 2008, the Academic Senate approved the following Senate Management Resolution presented by Senator Peter for the University Library Board.
Senate Management Resolution
“Creating a Task Force to Investigate Open Access to Faculty and Student Publications and Make Appropriate Recommendations”
Resolved, That the Academic Senate of San Jose State University shall create a task force, named the “Task Force on Open Access to Faculty and Student Publications”; be it further
Resolved,
The charge of this task force be: “to
investigate to what extent
Resolved, The task force be further charged to communicate widely with the University Community, disseminate information about “open access”, and consider pertinent suggestions from faculty, students, and other interested parties; be it further
Resolved, The task force consider, among other things, the examples of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences[1] in adopting an open access policy, the example of the NIH Public Access policy[2], and the success and reputation of open access journals published by the Public Library of Science; be it further
Resolved, The membership of this task force shall consist of:
The Chair of the University Library Board
The Dean of the University Library
A specialist from the library on institutional repositories
The Academic Vice President for Graduate Studies and Research or
designee
Chief Operating Officer,
or designee
One college dean chosen by the college deans
One graduate student selected by Associated Students.
One faculty from each representative unit appointed by the Academic Senate on nomination of the Executive Committee; with such members selected for their interest and/or expertise with RTP issues, copyright issues, government funded research and publications, practices of scholarly journals, electronic publication, and open access; be it further
Resolved, The task force shall make its recommendations to the Academic Senate by March, 2009; be it further
Resolved, That the Chair shall be elected by the whole task force from among its faculty members.
Rationale:
This Senate Management Resolution is in fulfillment of Sense of the Senate Resolution S08-3, which gave the following rationale:
The subject of “Open Access” to faculty publications has steadily grown in importance over the last several years and has finally reached a crescendo this spring. First, the NIH promulgated requirements for open access to publications funded by NIH grants, and second (after their own task force took a year to study the issue) the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a sweeping open access policy for nearly all articles they publish.
The general background for open access concerns the spiraling costs both of print journals and of online subscriptions to electronic journals. Universities have increasingly resented the fact that they hire faculty and fund their research, but that their libraries then have to pay huge amounts of money to access the fruits of this research. It has come to the point that many libraries can no longer afford to subscribe to all the journals in which their own faculty publish–or they can only do so by making inordinate sacrifices elsewhere in their budgets. This is a gross perversion of the ideals of academic freedom, in which the ideas and knowledge of faculty are supposed to be widely disseminated among their peers and colleagues for critical comment and public benefit.
For a number of years, University Libraries and faculty activists have urged that academia begin to take measures to find alternative ways to disseminate faculty knowledge. There have been formidable barriers to overcome–including the need to publish in established peer-reviewed journals, copyright restrictions, and others. Only recently have solutions to these problems begun to become available, as the Harvard faculty attest. For example, publishing in peer-reviewed journals does not preclude open access dissemination of faculty research and scholarship.
The University Library Board believes that it is now time for SJSU to examine these issues for itself, with the full resources of its faculty and staff. We now do have an electronic repository which could be used for faculty publications–if appropriate. Above all, a policy concerning something as vital as faculty publications should be produced by the faculty–and not imposed through external pressures.
Date: March 17, 2008
Present: Peter, Chung, Moon, Cox, Desalvo, Bernier, Kifer, Peterson, Bakke, Smith
Absent: Whitney, Chang, Von Till, Fleming
Vote: 9-0-0
Financial impact: None
Workload impact: The workload associated with one major committee assignment.