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Assembly Resolutions
Resolution on Author Fees
Passed by the Library Assembly on April 17, 2008
Whereas the Libraries’ mission is to “provid[e] access to … scholarly information resources required to meet the education, research and service missions of the University,” and
Whereas Open Access lifts many of the access barriers that usually accompany scholarly information resources, and
Whereas the Libraries already recognize the importance of Open Access and the feasibility of the author pays model through maintaining subscriptions or memberships to the Public Library of Science, BioMedCentral, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nucleic Acids Research in order to reduce the author fee rates paid by UM researchers whose work is published in these venues, and
Whereas the Libraries already promote Open Access through the DRUM institutional repository service, and
Whereas the Libraries aim to be “ubiquitous,” and
Whereas the Libraries subsidize the scholarly research that its employees conduct and then must purchase back the published products of that research at increasingly high costs, thereby eroding the Libraries' ability to build and maintain its collections, and
Whereas public and government agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), encourage widespread access to the products of sponsored research, and
Whereas scholars routinely lose control of their work by signing away their copyright rights to publishers,
Be it resolved that the Library Assembly urges its members to publish in Open Access outlets and further urges the Dean of Libraries to devote funds to pay Open Access author fees on behalf of library employee authors.
