THE ISSUES

THE RESPONSE

LINKS

HOW THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS IS RESPONDING

IDEALS: An Institutional Repository for U of Illinois

The University Library and CITES (Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services) are building an institutional repository service to support continual access to and preservation of digital scholarship at Illinois. Find out more...

Membership in New-Model Publishing Organizations

U of Illinois has joined forces with SPARC to advance the causes of open access and non-profit scholarly publishing. We're also a supporting member of Biomed Central and Nucleic Acids Research. Find out more...

Senate Endorses the CIC Provosts' Statement on Publication Agreements

On April 30th, 2007, the U of Illinois Faculty Senate endorsed the CIC Provosts' Statement on Publication Agreements. This statement urges faculty to retain some of their copyrights when submitting papers for publication in order to maximize the scholarly impact, accessibility, educational use, and readership of their papers. To facilitate this, U of Illinois authors are urged to consider amending the standard publisher's Copyright Transfer Agreement with the Addendum to Publication Agreement for CIC Authors.

The Addendum stipulates that the authors will be able to use their papers for research and teaching, and to make their papers freely available on the Internet within 6 months of publication, thus granting publishers the right of first impact. U of Illinois authors are urged to submit a copy of their paper to IDEALS -- the U of Illinois digital archive -- with the stipulation that it be made freely available after 6 months. Of course, some publishers already allow authors to mount their articles on institutional web sites; check the Sherpa/Romeo database for publisher policies.

For more background on the CIC Provost's Statement on Publication Agreements, and why the U of Illinois Senate endorsed it, please read the background information provided by the U of Illinois Senate Committee on the Library. (Word doc). To use the addendum, authors need only to fill in the form and staple it to the publisher's agreement form that they return to publishers prior to the publication of their article.

Senate Resolution on Scholarly Communication

In March 2003, the U of Illinois Faculty Senate approved a resolution on scholarly communication. Among other things, the resolution endorsed the Tempe Principles, a set of principles devised by several major American research libraries in 2000 and intended to "guide the transformation of the scholarly publishing system." (Many of the Tempe Principles have also guided the creation of this web site.)

U of Illinois Provost Katehi Joined Other Provosts in an Open Letter in Support of the Federal Public Research Access Act (FRPAA)

In July, 2006, 25 university provosts issued a strongly worded open letter that urged the Senate to pass Senate Bill 2695, the Federal Public Research Access Act (FRPAA). Read more, or read the letter.

Issues in Scholarly Communication Newsletter/Blog

Since 2001, Paula Kaufman, U of Illinois University Librarian, has published a bi-monthly electronic newsletter for the U of Illinois community, Issues in Scholarly Communication. With the launch of the Scholarly Communication web site in 2005, the newsletter switched to a blog format . Back issues of the newsletter are still available, archived. You may subscribe to receive updates by way of email or RSS feeds (what's RSS?) as soon as they are posted.

Educational Initiative

The University Library is providing a series of workshops for graduate students on scholarship issues.  See the current listings on the Library Workshops page.

Resources for librarians

U of Illinois librarians were briefed in the Spring, 2006, about the Scholarly Communication web site, as a support venue for their discussions with the faculty. In addition, the librarians were encouraged to explore the options they have in dealing with their own publications such as putting them in IDEALS or other open access institutional repositories, and maintaining their copyrights when submitting their papers for publication. A summary of scholarly communication resources was distributed to the members of the various library divisions. Researching librarians may also want to review sample copyright transfer forms from publishers that frequently publish research from librarians and information scientists -- Haworth (now Taylor & Francis / Informaworld), ALA, MLA, Elsevier, Wiley.  Librarians will want to refer to the Sherpa-Romeo database for the copyright agreement policies of other publishers.

Librarians are also urged to check out ARL'ss popular series of " Brown Bag" discussion guides for organizing library staff conversations, which have been revised and expanded (2008). Guides are now available on starting discussions of scholarly communication, talking with faculty, access to publicly funded research, author rights, institutional strategies for rights management, scholarly society roles, peer review, and new model publications. The guides, along with an overview for discussion leaders, are freely available at http://www.arl.org/sc/brownbag/.

Library Scholarly Communication Services - What the Library can do for YOU!

We have compiled a list of the various services the Library offers with regard to Scholarly Communication issues.