Recently, a number of institutions have issued policies detailing their support for Open Access. These OA policies set forth guidelines for this support. Typically, these policies revolve around an institutional repository that collects all of the work produced at that institution using a Green OA model.
An OA policy may:
Vassar Faculty voted to enact an Open Access Policy in May 2017. For more information and submission directions, see, Peer Reviewed Open Access Journal Articles Submission Guidelines.
Each member grants to Vassar College permission in the form of a nonexclusive, worldwide license to reproduce and publicly distribute, via Vassar’s institutional repository, each of their peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles, provided that the articles will not be sold for a profit. Each faculty member is expected to provide an electronic copy of the accepted manuscript of each article to the repository in an appropriate format as specified by the Vassar College Libraries.
The policy applies to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty of Vassar College; work completed prior to appointment at Vassar can be submitted at the faculty member’s discretion. For articles with copyright restrictions, and/or upon the express direction of the faculty author, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty will not apply the policy for a particular article or delay access for the necessary period of time. In collaboration with the Library Committee, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty will be responsible for interpreting and applying this policy.
Approved by the faculty at the Vassar College Faculty Meeting, May 10, 2017
Vassar's institutional repository, Vassar Scholarship collects, preserves, and provides access to scholarly works created at Vassar. Vassar Scholarship also serves a publishing space for student research, such as capstone projects.
Institutional repositories use a Green OA business model. The items deposited in an institutional repository can be pre-prints or post-prints. Most journals allow pre-prints to be posted even if they own the copyright to the finished article.
Below is a select list of Open Access policies from Vassar's peer institutions, and others with unique policies. Many of the policies are based at least in part on a template of model policy language from Harvard. MIT, Duke, Stanford and many other institutions too numerous to list have also adopted open access policies.
