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The group reviewed a draft change proposal for its policy initiative: “Achieving Equitable, Sustainable Access to the University of Maryland’s Scholarship and Research”. It is now under review by the Office of General Counsel and will be used to guide discussions with stakeholders to build support.  The group discussed whether the document was directed purely at faculty, rather than students and/or staff. It was noted that students are entitled to the rights of anything they write and that some staff members publish papers. More research on the Harvard model related to staff…

Philip Cohen is, unequivocally, a proponent of open science. He’s a sociologist, a demographer, the director of graduate studies in Maryland’s sociology department, and the founder of SocArXiv — a free, non-profit, open-access repository containing a wide array of social science research. Much of that research depends on a public audience for input and relevancy, Cohen said. The catalysts for a lot of Cohen’s own research into families, marriage and divorce came from interactions he had with the public. That’s why facilitating open science is a part of his personal mission. “How do we know…

Discussion centered on the most effective way to raise awareness by, and support from, both faculty/college and upper campus administration. The group will write a White Paper to include background and use cases as a next step; this will be used in discussions with the campus community and upper administration. Group members also discussed the two distinct elements of their focus: licensing principles and enacting the Harvard model. Once a set of licensing principles is adopted, the Libraries will be able to use them in their negotiations on a case-by-case basis. The Harvard policy needs a…

Draft licensing principles have been produced and endorsed by members of UMD PACT. These principles are open for comment from October 5, 2021 - March 27, 2021. We welcome your feedback. Please review the Licensing Principles and share your comments through this online form.

The group discussed the final draft of UMD’s Licensing Principles. The draft has now been posted to the UMD PACT website and is open for comment via an online form.

Matthew Salter, Publisher, American Physical Society (APS) attended this online meeting to help PACT further explore issues from scholarly societies’ perspectives.  The APS focuses on its community of researchers and scholars - their work and interests drive the creation of new and innovative specialist journals. The Physical Review journal series comprises 15 peer-reviewed research journals, five of which are fully open access. Several issues were discussed, namely... Model and Budget: APS’s primary publishing objectives have always been about increasing dissemination of research and…

James Grossman, Executive Director, American Historical Association (AHA) attended this virtual meeting.  AHA allows an author to retain copyright,  granting one-time use of the article in the journal, with other rights for reuse in any work the author may later publish being retained by the author. The author is also allowed to post the manuscript as submitted (before peer review or copyediting) on the author’s own website or IR, to post the accepted article (after peer review, but before copyediting or typesetting) on non-commercial sites after a 24-month embargo period, and to…

Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, and a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society attended this virtual meeting. Peter began by summarizing The Harvard rights-retention policy. By faculty vote, it gives the university non-exclusive rights to future faculty journal articles (not to other types of genres). Under the policy, Harvard has the right to upload manuscripts to its repository and make them open access, and faculty may still publish in journals of their choosing; the…

The group reviewed a draft document of UMD principles for scholarly publishing based on those of MIT. Discussion centered on the need for clarity regarding copyright and authors having discretion over where their work is deposited versus automatic deposit in, for example, DRUM, UMD’s institutional repository. The amended draft document will be brought back to the group for further discussion. See MIT licensing framework for publisher agreements: https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/  

Scholarly publishing model alternatives and UMD Libraries’ related services UMD Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Librarian, Terry Owen gave a comprehensive overview of the open access movement: history, OA (Open Access) development trends, alternatives to scholarly publishing (e.g. Libraries as publisher). Discussion points included:

• UMD Libraries provide funds that support faculty members to publish in open access journals.  Terry presented data showing how the Libraries OA funds were used. It was observed that OA funding for APCs (Article Processing Charge), in the long run,…
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