Professor Pandora's Week 2 Presentation:

The Rationale for, and Development of, an Open Access Policy for Research at the University of Oklahoma.

For this week, I thought I'd share with you an issue I've been working on for three years now at OU, on an initiative led by a cross-college faculty taskforce aimed at creating a university policy on Open Access for Research. The policy that was finally approved at the end of those 3 years of work is this one-page document: University of Oklahoma Open Access Policy.

The taskforce was convened by University Libraries (the University Libraries' Committee Scholarly Communication Taskforce, or SCTF for short), and we met for two years, studying the worldwide debates about OA and its history and examining the development of OA policies at a number of universities in the U.S. We met with various OU constituencies for question and answer sessions -- ranging from departments in all of the colleges, to administrative units, and the Provost's Office -- and then crafted a report, containing recommendations, to be presented to the Faculty Senate to see if they would authorize a Faculty Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Open Access, which they agreed to do (thus moving the issue forward from the Libraries' oversight, to the OU Faculty's oversight -- I know, so much bureaucracy!).

We put together a slideset that we used to introduce the topic to departments ahead of our scheduled meetings with them for the q&a sessions -- we did voiceovers that went along with the slides (I'm somewhere around 8:40 to 10:30, so if you listen to the presentation, you will finally be able to put a voice to the written information and such that I've sent to you all as we've started the class :-) It is from 2020, and it is 18 minutes long.

:: Finding The Balance: Creating an Open, Sustainable Future for OU

Finding the Balance Presentation by the Taskforce for Departments and other Units

There is also a formal, 20-page report that we created: Finding The Balance: Creating an Open, Sustainable Future for OU.

When the Faculty Senate Ad Hoc Committee was created last year I was also appointed to it, and so continued my work for the third year. Our charge was to craft a draft of the specific policy proposal to be voted upon by the Faculty Senate. During that process we met with leaders from Harvard University and the University of California as well as some other institutions to help us create as finely-tuned a document as possible. Our draft policy was put to a vote in March 2023, and was successful.

OU now has an open access policy, which commits the institution to encouraging scholars to make their work available to the public, without paywalls, and to ensure this can be made viable by putting resources behind maintaining an Institutional Repository and supporting scholarly authors in negotiating with publishers to retain as much copyright control over their own work as possible. (Note: No one is forced to share their research this way: it always remains the prerogative of the faculty member to participate or not).

If you are interested in this topic, here is a link to a pdf of an edited collection from 2023: Rethinking Institutional Repositories: Innovations in Management, Collections and Inclusion which has articles about what kinds of practices would help make institutional repositories serve not only as "containers" for scholarly work, but push the boundaries, and enable institutional repositories to realize creative possibilities going forward.