Open Access at PFW

The Open Access Policy at has three primary goals - to assert faculty control over the distribution and future use of intellectual and creative content; to disseminate the fruits of faculty research and scholarship as widely as possible; and to collect and preserve in perpetuity 's intellectual and creative output.

This policy will allow you to legally make your writings openly accessible, and it will enable to help you do so.  An Open Access repository, such as 's Opus, will increase discoverability of your work and maximize its impact. The repository is open to harvesting by search services such as OAIster and Google Scholar for maximum searching and indexing. Opus also provides storage of and access to a digital copy of your work.  A persistent URL and metadata for faculty work ensures that scholarly and creative works are preserved and accessible long after publishers consolidate, deaccession their collections or cease publication.

One of the goals of ’s Plan 2020 is to “expand the production of high-quality and high-impact scholarship by students, faculty, and staff. “ An Open Access Policy will capture that output, measure its use, and record its impact now and into the future.

The collection of faculty scholarly and creative output in Opus will benefit the institution by showcasing the university to interested constituencies, such as prospective students and their parents, faculty, donors, alumni, legislators and other stakeholders.

No. Harvard, MIT, Duke, Columbia, Stanford, and a host of other universities have similar policies. See MIT's list of Open Access Policies at Other Universities and  the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies. 

Research funders are supporting such efforts as well. For instance, the National Institutes of Health require posting of articles derived from research they fund in an open-access repository; and the federal government has now expanded the NIH mandate to other U. S. agencies such as Department of Energy, Department of Defense, National Endowment for the Humanities, etc.   

is already supporting an open access repository, Opus.  The repository is hosted by BePress and is backed up and mirrored to ensure its availability, longevity, and functionality, to the extent technologically feasible. It is also open to harvesting by search services such as OAIster and Google Scholar for maximum searching and indexing.

The Helmke Library has been working with faculty, students, and staff since 2009 to provide services for obtaining and loading content into the repository. In addition the library has provided assistance to faculty with copyright issues for many years.  The library has a Scholarly Communication librarian and a digital collections and scholarly communication unit dedicated to building the campus institutional repository.  Adjustments will be made to the current deposit processes as needed and, under the guidance of the Senate Library Subcommittee, the process will be made as convenient as possible.

The Senate Library Subcommittee (which is a standing committee of the faculty) is working with the Helmke Library to develop an implementation plan that has faculty interests in mind. They will solicit input from faculty and address issues as reported by faculty. The Senate Library Subcommittee will be responsible for presenting a report regarding the policy to the faculty in three years.

The policy operates automatically to give certain non-exclusive rights to any scholarly articles faculty members complete after its adoption.  By granting the rights at the time of the vote for the policy, in advance of future publications, the policy frees faculty from the need to negotiate with publishers. It secures the rights even when faculty fail to request them. It secures the same rights for every faculty member, not just the rights that a given faculty member might succeed in obtaining from a given negotiation with a given publisher. 

Copyright is not one right, but rather is best thought of as a bundle of rights granted to authors by the Copyright law. Generally these rights are reproduction, distribution, making derivative works, public performance, and public display. For to most effectively make scholarly articles freely and widely available. it may need to use many of these rights. For instance, simply taking a word processing file of an article, converting it to PDF and making it available for public reading or download could involve the distribution, derivative works, reproduction, and display rights. The most important points are that the policy does not prevent you from exercising any of these rights and 's exercise of these rights is only for the purpose of making articles freely and widely available.

By granting the rights at the time of the vote for the policy, in advance of future publications, the policy frees faculty from the need to negotiate with publishers.  It secures the rights even when faculty fail to request them. It secures the same rights for every faculty member, not just the rights that a given faculty member might succeed in obtaining from a given negotiation with a given publisher. 

’s license would still have force, because it would have been granted (through this policy prior to the signing of the publisher contract. If the publisher expresses concerns that cannot be remedied, you have several options. You could:

• Opt out for a given article
• Opt out until agreed upon embargo date or until copyright expires
• Consult with the Purdue University Copyright Office Director (ferullo@purdue.edu). 

will provide an opt-out option to the policy for any given article to any faculty member who requests one in writing (see more below under Opting Out.) You could also try to persuade the publisher that it should accept ’s non-exclusive license in order to be able to publish your article; seek a different publisher; or consult with the Director of Purdue University's Copyright Office (ferullo@purdue.edu) for further assistance.  

The Director of Purdue University’s Copyright Office (ferullo@purdue.edu) is available to support the policy and to supply guidance to faculty.

The policy applies to “scholarly articles.” Using terms from the Budapest Open Access Initiative, scholarly articles are articles that describe the fruits of research and that authors give to the world for the sake of inquiry and knowledge without expectation of payment. Such articles are typically presented in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and conference proceedings.

This policy does not cover writings such as op-ed pieces, popular articles, fiction and poetry, or scholarly writings that generate royalties (textbooks, monographs). Faculty are still required to submit citation information for all research, scholarly and creative works for inclusion in Opus, and the full-text of those works can, and are encouraged to be placed in the repository and with copyright permission can be made Open Access. 

No. The policy doesn’t apply to articles that were completed before the policy was adopted (April 13, 2015) nor to any articles for which you entered into an incompatible publishing agreement before the policy was adopted. The policy also does not apply to any articles you write after leaving . Faculty interested in including articles published before this policy was adopted should contact the library's Scholarly Communication librarian

Yes. Each joint author of an article holds copyright to the article and, individually, has the authority to grant a non-exclusive license. Joint authors are those who participate in the preparation of the article with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of the whole. It would be up to the co-author to decide whether to opt out of the policy for a given article to accommodate another co-author.

The author’s final version of the article will be submitted. That is, the author’s manuscript with any changes made as a result of the peer-review process. It may include post-review copy-editing done collaboratively between author and journal. It should also include all charts, graphics, and illustrations which the author has received permission to use. Typically, this is the author's final word processing document with all post-peer review revisions adopted. The publisher owns the rights to any post-review copy-editing done unilaterally by the journal, the journal’s pagination, and the journal’s look and feel. In most cases, authors must receive permission from publishers to post the published version.

faculty are already submitting their updated CV or a list of current publications to the library for loading into Opus. This policy will now give faculty the opportunity to add the full-text of their work along with the citation and metadata about the work. Faculty can either attach an electronic copy of the final, peer-reviewed, edited version of their scholarly article(s) with the CV, or library staff will periodically solicit from faculty post-print versions of their scholarly articles with the option to share immediately or to embargo for a specified time period.

If you have already submitted this version to a preprint server or other open access repository (e.g. arXiv, Pubmed), you may email the paper’s identifying repository number, or the URL, instead of the paper. 

No. Some journal publishers (including Elsevier, SAGE, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley) offer authors, for a fee, the privilege of making their article Open Access within an otherwise subscription-based access only journal. These same publishers permit authors to load their post-print of their article in the university repository where it is open access for free.

Under this policy, authors retain rights to their scholarly articles. An author may change a particular article's archival status (open access, delayed access) at any time. Contact the Scholarly Communication Librarian to impose temporary or indefinite embargo on the full text access to a specific article.  

When you submit an electronic copy of your manuscript for loading into Opus, indicate if the work can be shared immediately, shared after a publisher's required embargo period (supply date), or if it must be kept "dark" (or non-Open Access) until copyright expires and item is in the public domain. Opus has an embargo feature that will keep articles "dark" until the end of the embargo period or copyright expires, and then automatically opens the article for viewing. If a deposit is dark, the metadata about the work will still be Open Access. 

Faculty should always deposit suitable versions of their new scholarly articles in Opus. The content will be “dark” (hidden), but the metadata (citation and other descriptive information about the article) will be visible to facilitate search indexing and discovery. While the waiver prevents the article from becoming open access, it preserves the work in the repository archive.  The repository can then make the dark deposits Open Access whenever they are legally allowed to do so (copyright expires, publisher changes its Open Access policy, etc.)

A waiver gives faculty the freedom to submit new work to the journals or publishers of their choice without the risk of being denied due to the campus open access policy.  The opt-out option guarantees that faculty are free to decide for or against open access for each of their publications.  It gives publishers the option to accept articles instead of refusing to publish faculty bound by Open Access policies and eliminates fears of publishers, especially society publishers, that the Open Access policy will have an adverse effect on their business. 

Some supporters of Open Access believe that a waiver option will make the policy ineffective.  They worry that the waiver rate will be high.  However, the experience at every school with a waiver option is that the waiver rate is low.  At both Harvard and MIT it’s below 5%.

The policy creates an open access version of a scholarly article covered by copyright.  All of the rights and duties that exist in the case of traditional publication remain in the case of the Open Access version, including the ability to prosecute in cases of piracy or plagiarism.  If anything, it will deter piracy by allowing access to a freely available version of an article that might otherwise be distributed unlawfully.  Plagiarism is something that cannot be addressed by an open access policy.

There is no empirical evidence that even when all articles are freely available, journals are canceled. The major societies in physics have not seen any impact on their publishing programs despite the fact that for more than 10 years, an open access repository (arXiv) has been making available nearly all of the High Energy Physics literature written during that period. If there is downward pressure on journal prices over time, publishers with the most inflated prices – which tend to be the commercial publishers – will feel the effects sooner. Journals will still be needed for their value-added services, such as peer review logistics, copy editing, type setting, and formatting.

Many academic publishers have become supporters of university repositories. Their publication agreements often allow authors to deposit a draft or sometimes even the final published version of the article. A  recent study on green access policies of scholarly journal publishers found that publishers permitted distribution of 81% of accepted manuscripts.

This policy takes only a first step towards re-balancing the scholarly publishing system, giving a means of negotiating for faculty and allowing wider sharing of their research. Other steps will no doubt make sense in the future.