About halfway between Chicago and New York City, the county seat of Meadville, Pennsylvania, at the northwest corner of the state, could be said to be where the East Coast meets the Midwest. Meadville is the home of Allegheny College, a small liberal arts college with a single campus and a diverse undergraduate student population of 2,100. Its faculty members, over 90% of whom have terminal degrees, are expected to produce research publications in order to be awarded tenure.

On March 14, 2013, the faculty of Allegheny College voted to approve an Open Access (OA) policy governing faculty publications. Brian Kern, Head of Technical Services of the College’s Pelletier Library, described the implementation process of the brand new policy, along with the story of its origin and evolution.

The Pelletier Library has seven librarians among its 16.5 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff. Its print and electronic monograph collection of 1,040,668 volumes includes over 350,000 unique titles and is supported by 69 endowments and grants. The journal collection, consuming a third of the library’s budget and relying heavily on publisher packages, consists of 12,143 titles (with aggregated collections and free journals, the number rises to over 44,700). However, only 358 of those titles are subscriptions truly selected for the collection. This is only about a third of the number of subscriptions the library had prior to two substantial cancellation projects, forced by budget cuts, in 2004 and 2010 … with future cancellations anticipated.

Following its second round of journal cancellations in 2010, the library underwent a self-study and identified the need to advocate for OA as one of its goals.

The Pelletier Library already had a strong commitment to open source software, including the Sakai learning management system and an open source electronic resource and serials management system. And the library had already created a DSpace digital repository for students’ senior projects and historical documents, such as its prized collection of the documents of the journalist Ida M. Tarbell. Due to concerns for student privacy, the College created what is called a hybrid repository—part open and part closed—so that access to the student publications could be limited to individuals with a valid Allegheny College log-in.

Just around the time that the library was recognizing its commitment to promote OA, the issue began to be noticed by the college’s Academic Support Committee, a committee responsible for recommending sabbatical requests and allocating funds for faculty research. This committee suddenly became aware that its guidelines for research funding did not cover publishers’ OA fees, and that many faculty members had been paying these fees out of their own pockets.

So the stage was set, so to speak, to create a true institutional repository (IR) of faculty scholarship. The four members of the committee, in collaboration with the Pelletier Library’s director, began to draft an OA policy for Allegheny College, using existing OA policies as models. They discussed and agreed on some implementation details too, but deliberately left them out, to keep the policy simple and help ensure its approval by the faculty.

The committee’s first attempt resulted in what is known as an encouragement pledge, the weakest form of OA policy, with no requirement for faculty to submit their publications to the IR; as committee members continued to revise the policy, it grew stronger. The final version was a rights retention policy with a permission mandate, a policy that assumes that faculty authors will retain full rights to their work, and mandates that the authors give the library a copy, along with permission to host the work on the IR and the non-exclusive right to make the work openly available. This is the Harvard-style OA policy, considered to be the strongest type.

The policy only applies to peer-reviewed articles—not conference proceedings, poster sessions, or other non-scholarly content. And it applies only to works written or contracted to be published since the adoption of the policy on March 14, 2013—although earlier works may also be submitted and, if the author and publisher both consent, made openly available in the IR.

Naturally, publishers that make money on subscriptions and article purchase fees are not likely to embrace the idea of having the same content offered for free elsewhere. Some publishers restrict OA availability to a pre-publication version of the article—a preprint, the version prior to peer-review, or a postprint, after peer-review but before copy editing by the publisher. But Allegheny College’s OA policy does not specify which version of the article must be submitted; any version that is allowed by the publisher’s contract is acceptable for the IR.

Some publishers set an embargo period during which no version of an article can be made OA, and some prohibit OA entirely. Faculty members at Allegheny College are encouraged to try to negotiate with such publishers by submitting an addendum to their contracts. If negotiation fails, faculty are allowed to fill out a form to waive participation in OA. A waiver would most likely be submitted due to publisher restrictions, but any waiver submitted by faculty will be automatically granted, regardless of the reason.

But even faculty authors who waive participation in OA are still required to submit their works to the IR. If an author or publisher does not consent to allow OA to an article, it will be placed in the closed archive of the IR—“preserved but not disseminated,” in the words of the policy. In the case of publishers’ embargo periods, the articles will be moved to the open section of the IR once the embargo period has expired.

Prior to the faculty vote on the policy, the library’s director held meetings with faculty and used the library’s newsletter to explain and promote OA. Many in the library viewed OA as a way to change publishing models, reduce journal inflation, help the library, and increase public access to scholarly content … and those arguments were certainly a part of the discussion. But it was the Academic Support Committee that was primarily responsible for influencing the faculty on the issue, by arguing that OA empowered faculty authors to preserve their rights, rather than sign them over to publishers. This approach resonated with faculty, and was likely a key factor in the resounding approval for the policy.

Another contributing factor was the commitment of the College’s Provost. When the library offered to set aside a fund of $3,000 to cover OA publishing fees, the Provost offered to match every dollar in the fund and to allow unused funds to be carried over from year to year, a benefit rarely attached to any fund at Allegheny College. The Provost’s action sent a strong signal to the faculty that OA would be supported, and the library began to field requests to fund OA fees even before the OA policy was approved.

The library found its major role in OA at Allegheny College to be in its implementation, which is still underway. Implementation consists of two components, a website, created and maintained by the library’s director and an instructional technologist, and the DSpace IR, which is maintained by the Head of Technical Services, Brian Kern, with the help of a student assistant to be hired in the fall of 2013.

The website, still under construction at http://library.allegheny.edu/openaccess at the time of this presentation, consists of the policy itself, a rationale for the policy, and a frequently asked questions section, as well as links to informative sites about OA (Figure 1). When completed, it will also include online forms to request funding for OA fees or to waive OA availability for a specific publication, and a program that will generate a contract addendum, to be submitted to publishers, to eliminate embargoes or other restrictions from a contract.

Adopting and Implementing an Open Access Policy: The Library’s Role

All authors

Brian Kern & Susan Wishnetsky

https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2014.880035

Published online:

02 May 2014

FIGURE 1 Preliminary design of Allegheny College’s OA Web page (http://library.allegheny.edu/openaccess) (color figure available online).

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The DSpace component at https://dspace.allegheny.edu/handle/10456/34250 allows searching and browsing of the new “Faculty Scholarship” collection. When completed, faculty who log in will be able to access an article submission form, which will ask for basic citation information, an abstract, and details about publisher restrictions, along with the submission itself (Figure 2). The library will be flexible and accept submitted articles in any format, even on paper, but they expect that most faculty members will submit their material in the preferred PDF format, using the online form.

Adopting and Implementing an Open Access Policy: The Library’s Role

All authors

Brian Kern & Susan Wishnetsky

https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2014.880035

Published online:

02 May 2014

FIGURE 2 Preliminary design of Allegheny College’s “Faculty Scholarship” Web page (https://dspace.allegheny.edu/handle/10456/34250) (color figure available online).

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At the time of this presentation, the library had already received and posted one submission to the Faculty Scholarship collection, a student–faculty collaboration published by Elsevier, which was supported by funding from the library’s new OA fund.

Part of Brian Kern’s job is to populate the IR with content. He has already used the College’s online newsletter, People and Places, to discover new faculty works to put on display; he will now use it to identify faculty authors who have not yet submitted their files to DSpace, send them reminders, and make sure all new faculty publications end up in the IR.

Another way to build up the IR is with previously published articles that can be added to the open archive without violating any publisher contracts. A system developed by Stephen X. Flynn of the College of Wooster helps to identify them, utilizing Google Scripts and the Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access/and Rights MEtadata for Open Archiving (SHERPA/RoMEO) database of publisher permissions and restrictions to create a spreadsheet of an institution’s faculty publications.¹ Using this system, Kern discovered over 60 articles that could be added to the IR right away.

It is also necessary to create metadata for each submission. Each article will have a citation page created for it, and subject headings assigned. The IR must also be told what restrictions and embargoes are placed on access to the content.

Unfortunately, the version of DSpace currently in use at Allegheny College is unable to display the metadata while withholding the content, resulting in a rather unsatisfactory display of search results (Figure 3).

Adopting and Implementing an Open Access Policy: The Library’s Role

All authors

Brian Kern & Susan Wishnetsky

https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2014.880035

Published online:

02 May 2014

FIGURE 3 Current display of closed archive publications in the IR, with metadata suppressed (color figure available online).

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Using additional gateways into DSpace can resolve these problems with metadata display, but the latest release of DSpace is supposed to alleviate this problem by itself. This most recent version also provides more automated features, such as automatic monitoring of embargo expiration dates.

It is also important to make the metadata to be discoverable by Web searches in general, and there are three ways to make that happen. The first way is to turn on the feature in DSpace which permits search engines to index the site with the use of Web crawlers. The second is to use Google Scholar metadata mapping, dividing the elements of the citation into separate fields which correspond to the data fields used by Google Scholar.² And the third is to conform to the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) interoperability standard, which allows an IR to share files and data with other libraries’ IRs, catalogs, or discovery platforms.

The library uses the first two methods to expose its metadata out to the world at large, so these data are discoverable by Google and other search engines, at least. But conforming to OAI standards would have permitted access to all the files, including those which are supposed to be restricted. Again, this problem should be resolved once the library upgrades to the latest release of DSpace, allowing Allegheny College to comply with OAI standards without compromising the security of its closed archive.

Mr. Kern closed with what he felt he had learned through the process:

• OA should be viewed as a movement to educate faculty about their rights when they author a journal article … not about helping libraries or patrons.

• Funding to cover OA fees is an important way to get faculty on board.

• Establish an implementation plan even before the policy is passed.

• Be flexible in helping faculty understand and comply with the policy, and keep the submission process simple.

• Publicize the collection and make it available any way possible.