News

UMD PACT has co-sponsored, with the Office of Faculty Affairs, two events for Open Access Week [October 24-30]. Final preparations are in hand for the Special Order Presentation for Senate on November 10.  

The theme for the 2021 International Open Access Week, October 25-31, is "It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity.” This year, all students, faculty, staff, and community members are invited to participate in two virtual sessions on structural equity and open access in research and scholarly publishing. These events are sponsored by UMD PACT and the UMD Libraries. You can also view a list of virtual events worldwide. Session #1:Global Perspectives Breaking Down Paywalls and Building Up Equity: Open Access, Open Science, and Connections to Inclusive Knowledge…

UMD PACT members continue their campus departmental visits to discuss, and hear concerns regarding, the proposed equitable access policy. Preparations are going ahead for the Senate Special Order presentation.

TOME@UMD, a two-year pilot program of the national TOME initiative, is now accepting applications for three grants of up to $15,000 each that will sponsor the publication of open access, digital monographs by UMD faculty members. With a deadline of November 15, 2021, the process calls for applications from eligible faculty in all disciplines, but with preference given for those in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.  “Scholarly monographs are a critical form of knowledge dissemination in the arts, humanities, and social sciences,” said Linda Aldoory, Associate Dean for Research…

UMD has joined TOME [Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem] for a two-year pilot program. TOME is a national initiative to advance open-access (OA) publishing of monographs in the humanities and social sciences. TOME’s goal is to make this important scholarship available to readers across the globe, without cost and access barriers.  TOME@UMD is led by the University Libraries in partnership with the Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost, and the College of Arts and Humanities.    

UMD PACT releases Position Paper on Journal Subscriptions and "Big Deals". The group discussed next steps including the timing and procedure for bringing policy to the Senate. The Senate's University Library Council [ULC] is sponsoring UMD PACT and is seen as the means of bringing the policy to the Senate.

Read the full position paper below or download as a PDF. UMD PACT Position Paper: Journal Subscriptions, "Big Deals," and Achieving Sustainable and Equitable Access to Scholarly Information Key Points

• Bundled journal subscriptions with commercial publishers, known as “Big Deals,” can provide benefits, but UMD PACT members believe these agreements are increasingly undesirable and unsustainable for UMD.
• “Transformative agreements” advance the goal of increased open-access publishing, but often combine bundled access to a publisher’s corpus of titles with a form of payment…
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Work continues on the proposed change to campus policy including legal review by UMD's Office of General Counsel.

The group heard that approximately 90% of the Libraries' collections budget is used to pay for continuing resources such as databases and journal access. This is the case for most of our peer institutions. "Big Deals" or subscription bundles provide a method of accessing large numbers of journals. PACT members discussed, in general terms, the alternatives to the "Big Deal" being implemented now in the library world, and the ways these models may, or may not, align with PACT-related strategies.  

The University of Maryland Libraries has adopted a set of core licensing principles to guide negotiations with scholarly publishers and other vendors. The principles support the mission, vision, and values of the University and of the Libraries. They affirm the need to achieve sustainable, equitable access to knowledge and promote the retention of authors’ rights to use and disseminate their own scholarship, among other benefits to the campus community. “These principles articulate our collective resolve at the University of Maryland to achieve fair and sustainable licensing agreements,”…