VC Announces Funding to Support “Open Access” Authors’ Fees
Support for author fees of up to $750 per article is available upon faculty request from a new fund established by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development.
I personally consider this a major step for the university. I was on the planning committee for the Convocation on Scholarly Communications in a Digital World, & we recently gave our report to the faculty council. As part of that report, we proposed (and the faculty council passed) 2 resolutions:
Resolution 2005-7 on Faculty Ownership of Research
Be it resolved that UNC-CH faculty are the owners of their research and should retain ownership and use open access publication venues whenever possible.
Resolution 2005-8 on Scholarly Communications
Be it resolved that the Faculty Council encourage the Provost to:
- create a task force on scholarly communications to continue the work of the Scholarly Communications Convocation and to report back on the issues, problems and an on-going mechanism to propose and implement solutions,
- create a task force on establishing an institutional repository to determine the feasibility of such and to outline potential contents, indexing, etc.,
- work with department chairs to review tenure and promotion standards to recognize publishing in non-traditional sources, and
- require department chairs to discuss the problems in scholarly communications with their faculties.
While Resolution 2005-8 was important, Resolution 2005-7 was for my money the one with the really far-reaching implications. If the university wants faculty to retain ownership of their publications, then the university has to make changes to the tenure & review process that will provide incentives for faculty to actually change their publication habits. Funding to support open access publication fees is a major first step in that direction.
Of course, I can’t actually think of any open access journals in LIS that aren’t free. Anyone know any different?