On March 25, the Faculty Senate approved an Open Access (OA) Policy to provide greater access to scholarly articles by Case Western Reserve University faculty members. The OA Policy allows faculty members to retain rights to openly share and reuse their scholarly articles, including publicly posting their article in a repository. In adopting the OA Policy, the CWRU faculty is indicating a commitment to open and equitable sharing of research and scholarship.
CWRU joins around 100 other research institutions in North America that have adopted OA Policies, including Harvard, Georgia Tech, Dartmouth, MIT, and the University of California.
“We’re excited that the Faculty Senate decided to adopt the OA Policy proposal introduced by the Faculty Senate Committee on University Libraries,” said Kathryn Mercer, the 2023–2024 chair of the committee. “This new policy will align CWRU with many of our peers and will increase visibility of faculty work internationally, since open access articles receive more downloads and citations than paywalled articles.”
How does the policy work?
Under the OA Policy, CWRU faculty grant the university a license to share the accepted version* of their scholarly articles. Faculty choose if they want to share the accepted version in the university’s OA repository, Scholarly Commons @ CWRU. The accepted version is the postprint or author’s accepted manuscript after peer review and accepted for publication, but without the final editing by the publisher.
Faculty retain the copyright in their work, including the right to enter into a separate agreement with a publisher, but through the policy can still share their articles in Scholarly Commons. This policy applies to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored by CWRU faculty about which the faculty member entered into a publication agreement after March 25, 2024; previously published articles are not covered by the policy. The School of Law’s process is slightly different. Contact the Ben C. Green Law Library for more information.
Faculty members can learn more about the policy on the libraries’ research guide. Faculty can begin submitting their work to Scholarly Commons online or by emailing scholarlycomm@case.edu. Law school faculty members can continue to submit their work to the Law School’s Scholarly Commons repository.