University Library Committee Meeting Minutes 11/14/11
Members present: B. Brown, S. Brown, B. Clark, G. Goon, J. Overturf, D.Patterson, T. Ravas
Ex-officio member present: F. Snyder
Members absent/excused: D. Affleck, K. James, L. Muir, D. Molgaard
The meeting was called to order at 4:10 p.m.
Approval of the October minutes was postponed until February.
Communication Items:

Student members were welcomed to the committee.

The Committee will not meet in December.

Dean Snyder informed the committee that there have been no additional incidents of racist slips.

Dean Snyder distributed a list of the various libraries around the state that use Interlibrary Loan.

Professor Hines provided information about Open Access publication (handout appended). Open
Access is freely available online and works well with scholarly publications. It is not necessarily free
to put the material online. The key thing for authors to consider is how open access effects
opportunities for traditional publication that often include restrictions. Some universities have
adopted policies or resolutions strongly encouraging faculty to use open access. Open Access is a
business model aimed at reducing boundaries. The library has offered workshops on Open Access.
There was some discussion about copyright issues and spontaneous permission associated with the
fair use doctrine in copyright law. Open access allows professors to post links for students rather than
down loading materials.

Professor Brown reported on eBooks. Handouts contained collection statistics and a graph of
circulation of physical items verses electronic item click-through. Of the 32,000 journals, 98% are
available electronically. The library is also starting to back fill the more popular journals based on
turn away data. Last year there were 10,000 turn aways. The library has adopted a split approach to
building the collection. There is no effort not to buy print. EBook availability is increasing based on
package purchases or titles that faculty request.
Members were asked about their preference. Electronic journals are popular, but members prefer a
printed book when research requires more than just a section. Often journal articles will be printed as
well.
There will be discussion about the variety of eBooks formats at a subsequent meeting.

Members were provided with a Library organizational chart and given a tour of Bibliographic
Management Services. This area of the library is where ordering and processing (labeling,
cataloging, and digitizing) takes place. Members were shown the digitizing machine, donated
collections and the receiving area. The digitizing machine is able to document 3-D objects. Often
books will be ordered from Amazon with a Procard depending on the need. Amazon has overnight
delivery. Shipping boxes are recycled. Some repairs and binding (high use journals) are done in the
library. The committee would like to be informed about the policy to take a book out of circulation.
The meeting was adjourned at 5:00 p.m.
Open Access: Basic Information
Prepared by Samantha Hines for the Faculty Library Committee, Nov. 2011
A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access by Peter Suber, Senior Researcher @ SPARC1
Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing
restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.
In most fields, scholarly journals do not pay authors, who can therefore consent to OA without losing
revenue. In this respect scholars and scientists are very differently situated from most musicians and
movie-makers, and controversies about OA to music and movies do not carry over to research literature.
1
This definition is provided by Dr. Suber for use under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. For more
information visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly
literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal
editors and referees participating in peer review.
OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published
literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are
better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. Business models for
paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered.
For a longer introduction, with live links for further reading, see my Open Access Overview,
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm.
Open Access Venues
There are several outlets for open access literature. Many journals now publish under an open access
model, and several of these are peer-reviewed in the traditional manner. The best resource for finding
these publishers is to visit the Directory of Open Access Journals at http://www.doaj.org/. The United
States alone has 1342 journals listed through this directory in a wide variety of disciplines.
Another key venue is that of an institutional repository. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition (SPARC) describes institutional repositories:
Online archives of universities, colleges, funding agencies, and other institutions — known as “repositories” — are
key components of the emerging digital research infrastructure and can help ensure the widest possible sharing of
your works. These repositories collect, preserve, and provide free, unrestricted online access to all types of
institutional research outputs — seamlessly linking data, knowledge, and
scholars. (http://www.arl.org/sparc/repositories/index.shtml)
More information about institutional repositories generally can be found on the SPARC website
referenced above. The Mansfield Library is in the process of creating an institutional repository; the key
contact is Sam Meister, Digital Archivist, at sam.meister@umontana.edu. The Library’s Electronic
Theses and Dissertations repository already follows an open access model and can be viewed at
http://www.lib.umt.edu/etd.
It’s important for authors considering open access models alongside traditional publishing (such as those
depositing a preprint of an article in an institutional repository) to remember that traditional publishers
often limit the rights of authors to distribute or redistribute published works, even if the author holds
the copyright. For more information about what to look for in publishing agreements, please visit the
Mansfield Library’s guide to Copyright for Authors at http://libguides.lib.umt.edu/copyrightforauthors.
Open Access Policies
A number of universities have adopted open access policies, usually at the request of faculty members.
These polices can range from the support of an open access institutional repository for faculty and
university publications, to requirements that faculty only publish in open access venues. Most recent as
of this writing is Princeton University, which on October 31st announced that they had begun
implementing an open access policy passed by their faculty senate in September of this year. Under their
open-access policy, faculty members may publish their work on University sites, personal websites and
other not-for-fee venues, but are not to publish articles in journals following a traditional publishing
model.
Early this month a newly-formed group of universities calling themselves the Coalition of Open Access
Policy Institutions (or COAPI) will meet for the first time at the Berlin 9 Open Access Conference in
Washington, D.C. These 22 universities have varying policies but share a commitment to open access
publishing and the use of open access institutional repositories. A list of the organizations with links to
their policies and repositories can be found at http://openbiomed.info/2011/08/coapi-cats/. A larger and
more international list of institutions with open access policies can be found at http://roarmap.eprints.org/,
which also links to their repositories, offers analysis of their policies, and labels their policies as
institutional mandates, sub-institutional mandates, multi-institute mandates, funder mandates or thesis
mandates.
Some government agencies and other funders have begun adopting open access policies for funded
research. The goal is to make the results of funded research openly available to the public. The most
prominent example is the National Institute of Health, whose open access policy is available here:
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/
Further Questions and Information
The Mansfield Library is developing an Open Access guide page, which will be located at
http://libguides.lib.umt.edu/OA. This page will serve as a clearinghouse for information for the
University of Montana community on open access issues and initiatives. We also plan to provide more
face-to-face information sessions for faculty and graduate students on the issue (we have provided several
over the past two years).
If you have questions, ideas or suggestions as we build our information resources regarding open access,
please feel free to contact Samantha Hines at Samantha.hines@Umontana.edu or x7818.