The Latest in Open Access

The open access movement saw major developments in the past two weeks.  Last Friday, the Obama Administration mandated that federal agencies develop open-access policies in the next six months. Just a week earlier, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), a bi-partisan effort to increase access to federally funded research information, was introduced into Congress.

Under FASTR, federal agencies that spend at least $100 million per year on research must provide open access to the research results. The Obama mandate covers all federal agencies that spend at least $100 million per year on research or development. That means the president’s plan will cover 19 agencies, while FASTR would cover 11. Both acts complement each other and are a huge step forward for open access.

For more information about the mandate or FASTR, see this blog post by Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project, or this post by Kevin Smith, Duke University’s Scholarly Communications Officer.

Hope College instituted an Open Access Policy in October 2011. The policy requires that Hope faculty deposit their final manuscripts of peer-reviewed articles into Digital Commons.  It will continue to be important for the foreseeable future that Hope College faculty deposit their peer reviewed articles into the institutional repository. For more information on Open Access see the Hope College Open Access website.