HCA Scholarly Articles

This recipe bakes a diverse network of library and academic staff who can facilitate deposits through an institutional repository (IR), increasing the size of its collection, improving its metadata, and assuring greater licensing compliance. It will build a program that more efficiently facilitates deposits to an IR and creates scholarly communication and open access advocates in library and administration staff. This network speaks to the power and benefits of open access and addresses questions and issues in scholarly communication.

A significant challenge in administering an institutional open-access repository is acquiring local scholarly content to distribute and build the repository. Complicated licensing and author re-use rights can sometimes be viewed as a barrier by authors who are looking to deposit their work. Paired with the challenges of communicating the benefits of repository deposit and the rights afforded by institutional open-access policies, limited resources, or lack of administrative support, repository managers often struggle to build a broader culture around deposits outside of open-access advocates. A proactive, mediated, and collaborative publication review program can mitigate or solve some of these issues. By reviewing an author’s publication list or CV with an eye towards repository deposit, repository managers and scholarly communication librarians can demystify the process and educate depositors on licensing and open-access policies. Here, we outline such an effort at Harvard University.

Over the past decade, colleges and universities have been adopting institutional open access (OA) policies that encourage, direct, or give rights to authors to make their research publicly available in institutional repositories (IRs). These networked databases are often created to serve these OA policies, distributing an author’s research to a global online audience. Without copyright law, these policies and the supporting IRs could not exist: copyright law is the engine of a successful OA policy and thereby a successful IR. In particular, US copyright law features a statute that allows creators to transfer rights for a work without actually giving up total control of it. These non-exclusive rights are the foundation of the OA movement in the US.

This chapter begins with a brief introduction to the benefits and management of OA policies, focusing on their basis in copyright law and author rights. It continues with an examination of the ongoing disagreements among OA practitioners and publishers about what OA actually means and how the term “open access” can pose communication and workflow challenges for those working with institutional OA policies. Within this context, the authors describe common OA policy workflows and the activities librarians undertake to determine what version of an article can be deposited in an IR as well as how to communicate these nuances to campus stakeholders. It concludes with advice on how an IR can be used to advocate for author rights and comply with copyright law.