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Open Doors And Open Minds







OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS:

What faculty authors can do to ensure open access to
their work through their institution




























A SPARC / SCIENCE COMMONS WHITE PAPER


April 2008










Legal Disclaimer: This document is not legal advice, and this document does not create an attorney-client
relationship. SPARC and Science Commons provide this information on an "as-is" basis. SPARC and
Science Commons make no warranties regarding the information provided, and each disclaims liability for
damages resulting from its use.


OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS: WHAT FACULTY AUTHORS CAN DO TO ENSURE
OPEN ACCESS TO THEIR WORK THROUGH THEIR INSTITUTION

A SPARC / SCIENCE COMMONS WHITE PAPER

April 2008


Written by Thinh Nguyen, Science Commons

Contributors: Michael J. Carroll, Ray English, Rick Johnson, Heather Joseph, John Wilbanks, & Ann
Wolpert



Copyright © 2008 by SPARC and Science Commons. This White Paper is licensed to the public under a
Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0). Attribution under the license should be to SPARC and
Science Commons.


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SPARC
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Version 1.0, April 2008.


Available for free download at http://www.arl.org/sparc and http://www.sciencecommons.org.


Open Doors and Open Minds: What Faculty Authors Can Do to Ensure
Open Access to Their Work Through Their Institution

A SPARC / Science Commons White Paper


TABLE OF CONTENTS


I. Overview................................................................................................................................................1

A. Why Did the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Adopt Its University License Policy? 1
B. What Can You Do On Your Local Campus? ........................................................................3
C. What Is a University License and Why Is It Important?......................................................4

II. Plan of Action ......................................................................................................................................6

A. What Is the Right Process for Bringing About Policy Change?...........................................6
B. If a Vote by Faculty is Needed, How Can I Bring One About?............................................6
Case 1—Broad License Grant.......................................................................................7
Case 2—Intermediate License Grant ...........................................................................7
Case 3—Narrow License Grant....................................................................................8
C. What Is Needed to Implement a Policy Change? .................................................................8

III. Conclusion..........................................................................................................................................9

Appendix A - Action steps checklist........................................................................................................10
Appendix B - Sample addendum to publication agreement..................................................................11

About SPARC ...........................................................................................................................................12
About Science Commons.........................................................................................................................12
OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS | 1

I. OVERVIEW

The Internet has brought unparalleled opportunities for expanding availability of research
by bringing down economic and physical barriers to sharing. The digitally networked
environment promises to democratize access, carry knowledge beyond traditional research niches,
accelerate discovery, encourage new and interdisciplinary approaches to ever more complex
research challenges, and enable new computational research strategies. However, despite these
opportunities for increasing access to knowledge, the prices of scholarly journals have risen
sharply over the past two decades, often forcing libraries to cancel subscriptions. Today even the
wealthiest institutions cannot afford to sustain all of the journals needed by their faculties and
students.

To take advantage of the opportunities created by the Internet and to further their
mission of creating, preserving, and disseminating knowledge, many academic institutions are
taking steps to capture the benefits of more open research sharing. Colleges and universities have
built digital repositories to preserve and distribute faculty scholarly articles and other research
outputs. Many individual authors have taken steps to retain the rights they need, under copyright
law, to allow their work to be made freely available on the Internet and in their institution’s
repository. And, faculties at some institutions have adopted resolutions endorsing more open
access to scholarly articles.

Most recently, on February 12, 2008, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard
University took a landmark step. The faculty voted to adopt a policy requiring that faculty
authors send an electronic copy of their scholarly articles to the university’s digital repository and
that faculty authors automatically grant copyright permission to the university to archive and to
distribute these articles unless a faculty member has waived the policy for a particular article.
Essentially, the faculty voted to make open access to the results of their published journal articles
the default policy for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University.

As of March 2008, a proposal is also under consideration in the University of California
system by which faculty authors would commit routinely to grant copyright permission to the
university to make copies of the faculty’s scholarly work openly accessible over the Internet.

Inspired by the example set by the Harvard faculty, this White Paper is addressed to the
faculty and administrators of academic institutions who support equitable access to scholarly
research and knowledge, and who believe that the institution can play an important role as
steward of the scholarly literature produced by its faculty. This paper discusses both the
motivation and the process for establishing a binding institutional policy that automatically grants
a copyright license from each faculty member to permit deposit of his or her peer-reviewed
scholarly articles in institutional repositories, from which the works become available for others to
read and cite.

A. Why Did the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Adopt Its University License Policy?

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to adopt a policy under which (1) faculty are
required to deposit a copy of their scholarly journal articles in an institutional repository and (2)
automatically to grant to the University a University License (see definition in Section C below) to
make those articles openly accessible on the Internet. Each of these two components is
independently important.

The deposit requirement by itself is valuable because it ensures that the University’s
collection of Harvard-authored scholarship will grow significantly. Institutions (primarily in
Europe) that have adopted similar deposit requirements have experienced high rates of deposit,

OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS | 2
while those with voluntary policies have had low participation. The deposit requirement is also
effective even in the absence of a University License, since a large percentage of journal publishers’
copyright agreements already permit authors to post their final manuscript in online institutional
archives.

The University License serves three purposes: (1) it covers all the faculty’s scholarly
articles, including those published in journals that have not to date permitted authors to post
articles in their institutional repositories; (2) it standardizes the terms of the Institution’s right to
host its faculty’s work and make it openly accessible; and (3) it grants the Institution the right to
make additional copies of articles – for permanent archiving, for example – and to permit others
to use the articles so long as the use is not done for profit.

Harvard’s policy emerged from a collaborative effort by the faculty and the university
administration. Provost Steven E. Hyman, a member of the faculty of the Harvard Medical
School, a neuroscientist and former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, convened
a faculty committee to study and recommend actions to improve scholarly communication.
Professor Stuart M. Shieber, James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer
Science, chaired the committee. Having previously served on the FAS library committee and
having used the SPARC/Science Commons Author Addendum to retain rights to his own
scholarship for years, Professor Shieber was well acquainted with the obstacles to effective use of
the Internet for scholarly communication. Professor Shieber and his committee spent nearly two
years building consensus, working with the university administration, its library, faculty, and the
university’s Office of General Counsel.

The Harvard proposal approved by faculty vote stated that:

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the
fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that
commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the
President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her
scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the
permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up,
worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or
her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided
that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles
written 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 Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy for a
particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need…

Harvard’s policy implements the two important and distinct aspects of open access. First,
it mandates deposit in an institutional archive. Second, it creates an automatic license that
attaches to the work before the transfer of copyright to the publisher. To strengthen compliance,
Harvard’s policy creates an “opt-out” system that requires an administrative waiver for any
exceptions. To support the policy, the Harvard University Library will create a new Office of
Scholarly Communication to support faculty, to encourage deposit, and to develop the open-
access repository.

Other supporters included Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor
and Director of the Harvard University Library, who wrote an op-ed piece in the Harvard
Crimson, supporting the policy and citing the following reasons for the policy’s adoption:


OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS | 3
• Promoting openness and free communication of knowledge
• Making scholarship available to the world and sharing intellectual wealth
• Resisting a publishing model that is leading to spiraling prices of journals
• Changing a system that is siphoning resources from library purchases of monographs
(and thus adversely affecting library purchasing capacity for them)
• Realigning publishing in a way that favors learning
• Complying with the NIH mandate on public access
• Creating “a republic of letters in which citizenship extends to everyone.”

Faculty authors also benefit from the policy through an increased readership for their
articles. A faculty Council member, Judith L. Ryan, Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of
German and Comparative Literature, stated in the Harvard Crimson that her understanding of
“the problem this [policy] is supposed to address is the increasing monopoly that has developed
on the part of scholarly journals, who are now making it increasingly difficult for people to access
the material they publish.”

In addition to the benefits of open access cited explicitly by the proponents of the
Harvard policy, SPARC and Science Commons have long advocated open access to scholarly
articles as a critical component of advancing scholarly research. Even at institutions where
adequate access to relevant journals is not a major concern, researchers are not able to take full
advantage of technology to help them do research. Restrictions enforced by publishers on
automated research prevent the full development and deployment of tools and technologies that
could help researchers to overcome information overload, stay current with the state of the art,
utilize emerging computational research methods, and to make serendipitous connections to
discoveries in other fields. To take advantage of the full benefits of open access requires that more
universities join Harvard in adopting policies aimed at increasing the rate of deposits in
institutional archives that are freely accessible online.

B. What Can You Do On Your Local Campus?

The Harvard policy is an important turning point in the movement toward open access.
It demonstrates that faculty can agree on the need to retain control over their intellectual property
and create worldwide access to their work. It shows how faculty can commit to depositing their
work in their institutional repositories and to ensuring that their work can be freely accessed over
the Internet consistent with copyright law.

The experience at Harvard demonstrates the importance of internal champions who are
willing to devote substantial time to building consensus among multiple stakeholders. Any faculty
member can initiate change at his or her institution by becoming an advocate for such a policy
and by helping to educate his or her colleagues about the benefits of such a policy change.

Advocacy and education are only a start. Since an institutional policy change requires
coordination among multiple constituencies within an institution, it may be necessary for an
advocate to also act as a coordinator. The coordinator can help the institution as a whole
determine the right process, the right license, and the right implementation. This may involve
participation by the administration, including the president, various deans, the general counsel,
the librarian, as well as the faculty, including the relevant faculty committees, unions, and
representatives.

Each college or university has a distinctive culture, and the most effective means for
advocating for an open access requirement is likely to vary. The goal in all cases is to adopt a
policy that is binding upon the entire faculty. Often this will involve a faculty vote, administrative
action, or both. Here are some of the tasks to undertake:


OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS | 4
• Identify potential avenues of policy change at your institution. At larger institutions, it
may be most effective to seek the creation of a special committee or task force charged
with reviewing the college or university’s scholarly communication practices and policies
and making recommendations about the desirability of an open access mandate. This can
be particularly effective if the group includes influential faculty from a range of
departments. In other cases, raising the issues within an existing committee may be more
effective. It is equally important to identify those in the administration who are most
likely to support an open access policy. Look into your institution’s policies, by-laws,
faculty governance structure, and charter to understand how this process may come
about. You may wish to speak to members of the administration to understand the
process for initiating a policy change. In many cases, the general counsel may also assist
you in understanding the institutional requirements.

• You will need to educate your colleagues or your administration on the policy choices,
such as the license options, that are available. You may need to work with the general
counsel to understand how your proposal would fit in with the institution’s legal policies
and how the policy change might be implemented in practice.

• Identify and secure resources that will be needed once a policy is adopted, such as the
capacity to manage the deposit of scholarly articles and to make them available online.
This will usually be undertaken by your institution’s library.

C. What Is a University License and Why Is It Important?

In addition to adopting a policy that mandates faculty deposit of their final article
manuscripts in the institution’s digital archive, adopting a University License is an important
institutional response that can ensure broad and open access to the results of its faculty research
outputs.

As used in this paper, a “University License” is a grant of permission by a faculty member
to his or her employing academic institution to use his or her peer-reviewed scholarly articles for
certain purposes. These typically include depositing the article in an institutional repository,
complying with funder requirements, and making the article publicly available for download. The
scope and limitations of such a license may vary depending on the policy objectives of the
institution, which will be discussed in more detail later in this paper.

The U.S. Copyright Act grants each author, automatically upon the creation of an original
work in a tangible medium, the exclusive rights to reproduce, distribute, publicly display, and
publicly perform the work and to prepare derivative works, provided the work shows a modicum
of creative expression. U.S. authors may also have protection in other countries by treaty, and
while the scope of protection may vary, these exclusive rights are generally similar.

An author may authorize others to exercise these exclusive rights either by granting
permission, known as a “license”, or by assigning ownership of the copyright. A license can be
exclusive (granted to a single person or entity for its duration) or non-exclusive (able to be
granted to an unlimited number of people at the same time). Under U.S. law, granting an
exclusive license or an assignment requires a written agreement while a non-exclusive license may
be granted informally, such as by verbal permission.

Under U.S. Copyright law, a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her
employment is generally regarded to be a “work for hire,” for which the employer is considered to
be the author. However, there is considerable uncertainty and disagreement in the U.S. about
whether scholarly articles fall within this “work for hire” category. To clarify the situation, many
universities have policies, agreements, or established practices stating that faculty own the

OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS | 5
copyright in their scholarly works. Many of these faculty authors, in turn, assign ownership of (or
grant an exclusive license to) their copyright to journal publishers through publication
agreements that they sign prior to publication.

Unless the publication agreement or publisher policy provides otherwise, once copyright
ownership is assigned (or an exclusive license is granted) the author retains none of his or her
rights under copyright to copy or distribute the article or to authorize others to do so. Thus, the
author may not be permitted to copy or distribute his or her own article, including substantially
similar pre-print manuscripts, or permit his or her employing institution to do so, unless the
publisher’s policy permits. Even where the publisher’s policy may permit some forms of deposit
or personal archiving, these policies may be difficult to obtain and interpret.

The complete transfer to publishers of exclusive rights under copyright can create a
number of issues for authors:

• They may be unable to contribute to an institutional repository that is intended to
preserve and showcase faculty scholarship. This limits the repository’s completeness and
scope and reduces the number of potential readers of the author’s work.

• They may not be legally permitted to distribute copies of their work to colleagues,
collaborators, and grant providers.

• They may be unable to comply with the terms of a grant or the policy of a grant provider
that requires public access. Examples of private grant providers that have public access
policies are the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institution. In addition,
under the Revised Public Access Policy adopted by the National Institutes of Health,
grantees are required to ensure that peer-reviewed journal articles reporting research
supported by NIH grants are deposited in PubMed Central for public availability within
12 months of first publication. In order to comply with these policies the grantee must
either choose to publish in a journal whose policies permit compliance with these
requirements or negotiate (or pay) for the rights to do so.

Adopting an institutional policy that employs a University License is an effective
institutional response to these concerns. Compared to other options, most of which rely on a
myriad of negotiations between individual authors and individual publications, a University
License may constitute the most comprehensive and least administratively burdensome option in
the long term.



OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS | 6
II. PLAN OF ACTION

Whether your role as an advocate is to educate others or to serve as a coordinator, or
both, you should familiarize yourself with some basic policy options and develop a plan of action.
The plan needs to identify the most effective process to achieve adoption of the policy, the deposit
requirement, the desired scope of the University License, and opt-out provisions. It should also
incorporate an implementation strategy once such a policy is adopted.

A. What Is the Right Process for Bringing About Policy Change?

Harvard University adopted its open access policy as a result of a faculty vote, but this
may not be the only option available. The strategy for your institution will be dictated by rules
established under your institution’s charter, by-laws, rules, and procedures.

Start by talking with your institution provost, faculty leadership, and general counsel’s
office about the options. Some institutions may take the position that the institution owns the
copyright in the scholarly articles published by its faculty, and subjecting the policy to a faculty
vote may contradict such a legal position. In other cases, the administration may be reluctant to
back a mandate without faculty consent.

B. If a Vote by Faculty is Needed, How Can I Bring One About?

1. What Process Is Mandated To Adopt the Policy?

Given your institution’s policies and procedures, determine whether, under your
institution’s policies, a faculty vote is necessary for the policy to be adopted. If so, what are the
procedural requirements for such a vote to be taken? If it is not binding on the faculty, what
additional action by the administration is needed? Who are the internal champions for change
that need to be lined up behind the proposal? If a faculty vote is not necessary, will it nevertheless
be helpful to demonstrate campus support for the policy to the administration? Is there a way for
you to take a poll of faculty to measure support for the policy?

Once you have determined the procedural requirements and identified internal
champions, you may wish to work with an existing committee or ask for appointment of an ad
hoc task force to examine the institution's scholarly communication policies and practices and to
make recommendations concerning the University License. The committee should identify the
motivations for adopting a deposit requirement and a University License, specify the parameters
of the license, and make recommendations regarding the internal resources needed to support
faculty in making the transition and to maintain the institutional repository.

2. Why Is a Deposit Requirement Important?

With a deposit requirement, all faculty covered by the policy would agree to obligate
themselves to deposit their journal articles in your repository. This will create a much more
comprehensive archive of the covered institution’s research output. Without such a requirement,
experience suggests that an open access policy is unlikely to be effective. In developing the
language of the requirement, consider which version of the article should be deposited  the
author’s final manuscript (which includes any revisions made after peer review) or the final
published version. An advantage of the author’s manuscript is that it is the final electronic version
over which the author has control. In addition, many publishers permit archiving of final
manuscripts in their copyright agreements. A disadvantage is the fact that it is not the citable
version. Consider as well the question of timing. An optimal policy would stipulate that deposit
should occur when the article is sent in for layout and copy editing. However, due to some journal
requirements, it is also acceptable to require deposit no later than the date of publication.

OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS | 7

3. What Is the Right Scope of the University License?

Prior to any vote on adopting a University License, the scope of license must be defined
and explained to the faculty. In general, a license can be a very flexible tool that allows the bundle
of rights that constitute copyright to be divided, restricted, or limited in many ways. To simplify
our discussion, we will consider three likely options ranging from broad to narrow grants of rights
to the institution. Which option is chosen depends in part upon the preferences of the faculty, the
resources available to help faculty in negotiating with publishers, and the objectives of the
institution in adopting the policy.

The rights under copyright that can be licensed are the rights of reproduction,
distribution, creation of derivative works, public display, and public performance. A license to any
or all of these rights can be supplemented by specific license limitations, such as the duration,
geographical scope, revocability, and right to sublicense, or any other restrictions that the licensor
wishes to specify. A grant can also be of an exclusive or non-exclusive license, but for purposes of
this paper, all versions of the University License considered will be non-exclusive, because
otherwise publication in a non-institution journal would be not be possible.

Case 1—Broad License Grant

As a practical matter, the broadest possible license grant to the institution is a non-
exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise all of author’s exclusive rights under
copyright, including the right to grant sublicenses. Ideally the policy should broadly encompass all
of the author’s rights under copyright rather than specific enumerated rights.

A perpetual license means that the license lasts for the duration of the copyright (subject
to any right of the author to terminate under statute). Worldwide means that the scope of the
license is everywhere copyright protection exists, which is particularly important for online
distribution through the Internet. Irrevocable means that the copyright owner (either the author
or the publisher to whom copyright is assigned) may not terminate the license at will.

The right of sublicense means that the institution may authorize others to exercise the
copyright. For example, it would allow an institution to authorize a third party to copy and
distribute the article, thus allowing distribution through a Web portal other than the institutional
repository’s Web site. This right would also allow the institution to grant rights to public
repositories or funders in compliance with funder mandates.

Many license grants also state that the license may be exercised “in any medium” in order
to avoid any interpretation that would restrict the scope of the license grant only to means of
reproduction or distribution available with current technology. However, this may not be always
necessary, especially if the license is broadly constructed.

Case 2—Intermediate License Grant

An intermediate case involves license restrictions that modify the scope of the license
grant in Case 1. The license called for by the Harvard FAS policy contains a limitation that the
articles not be “sold for a profit” by the institution. Thus the author is still free to grant to a
journal publisher an exclusive license to sell the articles for a profit or to reserve that right to
himself or herself.

Another potential license restriction is to specify that the license may only be exercised
after a certain period of time (i.e., the “embargo period”). Some funders specify a maximum

OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS | 8
embargo period, and thus it may make sense to make the public accessibility from the
institutional archive consistent with the funder mandated public accessibility date.

Case 3—Narrow License Grant

A narrow license grant might provide the institution only the right to deposit the article
in the institutional repository and make it available only by means of the repository’s Web site.
Some publisher’s policies already permit the author to deposit a copy in the author’s institutional
repository, but not elsewhere. In some cases the publishers require that such access is limited to
the institution. A narrow license grant would therefore not include the right to grant sublicenses
under the author’s copyright (e.g., to NIH or another grantor). The result would be that the
article is available for free download only from the institution’s archive.

While this approach may simplify authors’ interactions with publishers, a narrow license
grant has several drawbacks:

• The narrow license grant does not allow for the creation of derivatives, so that
abridgements, translations, or other modifications of the article later may still require the
permission of the copyright owner (which may the publisher). Therefore, unless the
author takes additional steps to reserve rights, he or she may be unable to re-use his or her
work in future works.
• It may not provide an adequate mechanism for complying with funder mandates that
require deposit in a public repository such as PubMed Central.
• Limiting the availability of the article may reduce its impact by making it harder to find.
• Failure to anticipate future technology may eventually necessitate revisiting the issue.

Another approach to a narrow license would be to secure only the rights to deposit in
accordance with funder mandates. However, to do so would be to miss a critical opportunity to
further scholarship and institutional learning within the organization. In addition to some of the
drawbacks indicated above, such a policy would make it difficult for the institution to enrich its
own repository, to showcase faculty scholarship, and to develop its own unique initiatives for
furthering collaboration and scholarship.

4. What are the opt-out options?

In order to ensure faculty flexibility in dealing with publishers, consider incorporating
into the policy an opt-out provision at the article level. The Harvard policy allows faculty to
waive both the deposit requirement and the University License for a given article upon request.
An alternative approach is to allow faculty to waive the University License only, but not the
deposit requirement. Such a policy would ensure that all faculty articles are digitally archived, but
those that are deposited by faculty who waive the University License would not be made openly
accessible, unless the faculty member allowed it at a later date. Such a policy maximizes archiving
while also maintaining faculty flexibility in negotiating with publishers who do not accept open
archiving or accept it only after a lengthy embargo period.

C. What Is Needed to Implement a Policy Change?

The need to discuss with faculty the details related to an open access policy is a vital first
step. Mechanisms to communicate with publishers are an essential second step.

In some cases, the publication agreements that faculty authors are asked to sign may state
in “boilerplate” language that the author represents to the publisher that no previous licenses have
been granted. If certain statutory formalities are met, a non-exclusive license such as the
University License will prevail over a conflicting assignment of copyright to a publisher without

OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS | 9
the need for further action on the part of the author. This is a main advantage of adopting a
University License.

To be certain, however, the author should provide some form of notice to the publisher at
the time that the publication agreement is entered into that any representations are qualified by
the grant of the University License or any other license mandated by funders. Science Commons
and SPARC both offer author’s addenda that may be attached to a publication to help the author
reserve rights to distribute a work in an institutional archive, among other possible rights, and to
put the publisher on notice that these rights have previously been granted. Harvard has also
created its own addendum for this purpose, which is attached as Appendix B.


III. CONCLUSION

Adopting a policy with an automatic University License and a deposit requirement has
many benefits for the individual author, the institution, and the public. A successful local effort to
implement such a policy is likely to require committed advocacy and educational efforts. A broad
range of institutional stakeholders must be involved and must act in a coordinated fashion to
bring about the required action.

Options for initiating such an action include faculty vote, administrative action, or both.
In addition, various licensing options must be considered and an appropriate approach selected.
Finally, it is important to plan the implementation of the policy carefully to ensure that adequate
resources are devoted to maintenance of the institutional repository and that assistance and
guidance is offered to faculty as they adapt their agreements with journal publishers.

Recent developments create new opportunities for academic institutions and their
faculties to advance their missions. By working together to explore, develop, and implement
policies that enrich institutional repositories and provide open access, they can not only meet the
challenges of complying with funder mandates but also ensure the preservation and widespread
dissemination of faculty scholarship.


* * * * *





OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS | 10

APPENDIX A


Action Steps Checklist

Here is a summary of key steps to implementing a University License policy at your institution:

1. Identify key internal supporters and champions.

2. Research your institution’s rules and procedures to understand the right process
for initiating the policy change.

3. Work with provosts, faculty governance, and the general counsel’s office to
determine critical policy and legal requirements that must be met by the policy.

4. Work with an existing faculty committee or create an ad-hoc committee to study
your institution’s scholarly communications policy.

5. Communicate the plan to faculty and key stakeholders and conduct surveys or
obtain other feedback to determine faculty support.

6. Identify and take advantage of events for education and awareness building, such
as seminars, discussion panels, presentations, and colloquia. Consider holding a
workshop to discuss open access and the Harvard policy.

7. Develop a set of policy recommendations, including the scope of the University
License, the deposit requirement, and opt-out provisions.

8. Identify critical resources and support that will be needed to implement the policy,
including responsibility for maintaining an institutional archive. Prepare to provide
resources to assist faculty in complying with the policy and working with
publishers.

9. Plan for success: work with the institution library to make sure there is a repository
to maintain and allow download of deposited articles and that it has sufficient
capacity – or that there is a plan to create one.

10. Find the faculty who already are posting their work on the Internet by searching the
Web and asking around. By their actions, they are signaling an understanding of
why open access is important. Do the librarians have stories of access problems
faced by faculty or other researchers?


This document is the addendum developed for Harvard FAS faculty in

association with the Harvard FAS open access policy of February 12,
2008. The two paragraphs in italics are optional paragraphs used at the

author's discretion.

ADDENDUM TO PUBLICATI ON AGREEMENT
1. This Addendum modifies and supplements the attached publication agreement (the "Publication Agreement")
concerning the article titled ______________ (including any supplementary materials, the "Article") in
______________.
2. The parties to the Publication Agreement as modified and su LEpplemented by this Addendum are:
______________ (corresponding author) (individually or, if more than one author, collectively, "Author") and
______________ ("Publisher").
3. The parties agree that wherever there is any conflict between this Addendum and the Publication Agreement,
the provisions of this Addendum will control and the Publication Agreement will be construed accordingly.
4. Notwithstanding any terms in the Publication Agreement to t Phe contrary, Author and Publisher agree as follows:
a. All of the terms and conditions of the Publication Agreement, including but not limited to all grants,
agreements, representations and warranties, are subject to and qualified by a non-exclusive license
previously granted by Author to Harvard University. Under that license, Harvard may make the Article
available and may exercise all rights under copyright relating to the Article, and may authorize others
to do the same, provided that the Article is not sold for a profit.
b. In addition to any rights retained by or granted to Author in the Publication Agreement, Author retains
the non-exclusive right to make the Article available M and to exercise all rights under copyright relating
to the Article, in any medium, in connection with Author's teaching, conference presentations, lectures,
other works of authorship, and professional activities, and to authorize others to do the same.
c. Where applicable, all of the terms and conditions of the Publication Agreement, including but not
limited to all grants, agreements, representations and warranties, are subject to and qualified by any
non-exclusive license previously granted, or previously required to be granted, by Author to a funding
entity that financially supported the research reflected in the Article as part of an agreement between
Author or Author's employing institution and such funding entity, such as an agency of the United
States government, and/or to Author's employing institution.
d. Publisher agrees to provide to Author within 14 days of first publication and at no charge an
electronic copy of the published Article in a format, such as the Portable Document Format (.pdf), that
preserves final page layout, formatting and content of the published version. No technical restriction,
such as security settings, will be imposed to prevent SAcopying or printing of that copy. The published
version may be used in the exercise of the rights and licenses referred to in the paragraphs above.
e. Nothing in the Publication Agreement will impose any limitation on the rights and licenses referred to
in the paragraphs above or any obligation in connection with their exercise. Neither the existence nor
the exercise of those rights and licenses will be deemed to violate any representation or warranty or
breach the Publication Agreement.
5. Either publication of the Article or Publisher's signature below will constitute Publisher's acceptance of and
agreement to this Addendum.
AUTHOR

PUBLISHER

__________________________________

___________________________________
(corresponding author on behalf of all authors)


__________________________________

___________________________________
Date

Date
OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS | 12


About SPARC

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance
of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing
system. Developed by the Association of Research Libraries, SPARC has become a catalyst for
change. Its pragmatic focus is to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communication models
that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries.
Action by SPARC in collaboration with stakeholders – including authors, publishers, and libraries
– builds on the unprecedented opportunities created by the networked digital environment to
advance the conduct of scholarship.


About Science Commons

Science Commons designs strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific
research. Science Commons identifies unnecessary barriers to research, crafts policy guidelines
and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develops technology to make research data and
materials easier to find and use. The goal of Science Commons is to speed the translation of data
into discovery and to unlock the value of research so more people can benefit from the work
scientists are doing.