Last Updated on October 21, 2015, 6:32 pm ET
Open Access Week 2015 is in full swing! Here’s a list of events happening this week worldwide.
Just a couple quick points of note. First, Congress continues to consider S. 779, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), which the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee unanimously approved. It calls on federal agencies with research budgets of over $100 million to establish, to the extent possible, common public access policies for peer-reviewed journal literature resulting from federally funded research. ARL continues to engage with Congress on this issue to support passage of this bill.
Additionally, there was great news to start off the week with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign passing its Open Access policy. The policy (subject to waivers) states
Each Faculty member, for the purpose of making his or her scholarly articles widely and freely available in an open access repository, grants to the University of Illinois a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is one of several universities that have adopted open access policies this year, building on the success of policies adopted by universities previously. MIT Libraries maintains a list of institutions with open access policies and their scope.
Enjoy the rest of #OAweek2015!
