Science Commons Announcements

["Donna Wentworth" <dwentworth AT creativecommons.org>]

A new open access mandate at Stanford

June 28th, 2008 by dwentworth

I'm late to the game on this, but can't resist passing along the good news: the faculty at the Stanford University School of Education has reportedly voted to adopt an open access (OA) mandate.

Les Carr, who attended the conference where OA luminary John Willinsky shared the news, writes:  "[Willinsky] banged the drum for Open Access and announced an OA mandate for the Stanford School of Education. According to the story, he was describing the Harvard mandate to his colleagues in a meeting and they instantly voted to adopt a similar mandate themselves. Way to go!"

At Science Commons, we work to help scholars retain the rights to share their work, and to bring open access to more institutions [PDF], so it's extremely encouraging to see faculty authors at Stanford not only embracing OA personally, but also working to implement it at the institutional level — changing the "default setting" for published research from closed to open.

Just in time for the Stanford announcement, C&RL News has published an article that puts the decision in a larger context. The piece, Two new policies widen the path to balanced copyright management: Developments on author rights. explores the implications of the NIH and Harvard mandates, and contains the following apropos observation:

Norms are always more difficult to change than technologies. We are now witnessing a key shift in norms for sharing scholarly work that promises a giant step forward in leveraging the potential of network technologies and digital scholarship to advance research, teaching, policy development, professional practice, and technology transfer.

Hear, hear. Kudos to the faculty at the Stanford School of Education for helping to make it happen.

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Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
dwentworth AT creativecommons.org
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