Oops! Are We Missing from the Open Access Group?

Inside Higher Ed today notes that various universities, public and private, have formed the Coalition of Open Access Policies.

Among the members are such institutions as MIT, Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford. But no UCs are listed, although – as noted above – public universities in other states are members. Apparently, the Coalition was started at the U of Kansas. If you click on the link at the end of this entry, it will in turn send you to a link to a press release at that university which says:

In 2009, KU was the first public university in the United States to adopt an open access policy regarding faculty research published in peer-review journals. The policy “asserts the rights of KU faculty to provide broad, free access to their journal publications to colleagues around the world.”

Just today, yours truly receive a link to a journal article at the journal itself. To read the article, however, one had to have a paid subscription. If you went to the faculty website of the author (who is at one of the institutions listed above), you can find the article for free. In fact, it is quite common for faculty to put articles they have written directly on their websites. Journal publishers – who have copyrights – could in principle object to this practice, but generally don’t. Still, the legal limbo remains.

The question remains as to whether UC should be part of the Coalition and/or why it isn’t.

The link mentioned above is http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/04/qt#266915