The University of Virginia Faculty Senate discussed how to make scholarly articles more accessible when it met Wednesday in the Rotunda Dome Room.
Edmund Kitch, a law professor, and Brian Pusser, a professor at the Curry School of Education and chairman of the senate's Task Force on Scholarly Publication and Authors' Rights, presented a draft resolution on open access to scholarship with the intention that senators vote on it at their November meeting.
Under the proposed resolution, U.Va. faculty members would assign to the rector and Board of Visitors "a nonexclusive, irrevocable, non-commercial global license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of her or his scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided the articles are not sold for profit."
The policy would apply to all scholarly articles written by faculty members while at U.Va., except pieces that were written before the policy is adopted and remain under "incompatible" licensing agreements. All other articles would be turned over to the provost's office in electronic form and made generally available no sooner than 12 months after their journal publication. ...
Madelyn Wessel, special adviser to the University librarian and a member of the task force, said the current resolution is based on a similar policy at Harvard University. ...
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
