Open Access and Education

Last year, the University of Maryland was excited to join the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship, or HELIOS, a new national initiative aiming to spark collective action to advance open scholarship. According to HELIOS, open scholarship (sometimes called “open science” or “open research”) is “an expansive term meant to encompass the rapid and widespread sharing of a range of scholarly activities and outputs, across disciplines,” including the research process itself, open access publication, and data sharing.

On August 25, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum regarding the open sharing of government-funded research. The memo, Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research, issues guidance to all federal agencies to develop plans ensuring that publicly funded research outputs will be openly available.

The University of Maryland Libraries has joined a pioneering open access initiative that will make scholarly books openly available for researchers across the globe. Along with all member libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), UMD is now part of a three-year collective action agreement with the MIT Press.

The UMD Libraries is now accepting applications for the Open Access Publishing Fund for 2022-2023. Established as a recommendation of the 2013 Report of the Joint Provost/Senate Open Access Task Force, the fund helps UMD researchers cover article-processing charges levied by peer-reviewed open access journals. Eligibility requirements and guidelines, along with a link to the application form, are available online. Please note that for 2022-2023, the Libraries will fund 50% of the fee for a single article.

At its meeting on April 6, 2022, University of Maryland's Senate voted to approve a new institutional policy that will advance equitable, open access to the University's research and scholarship.

The University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries are pleased to announce that we have signed a one-year, cost neutral contract extension with Wiley in collaboration with the BTAA.  The agreement extends our existing Wiley Online Library Database Model contract, and includes a new Open Access (OA) option, as a pilot in collective action toward the BTAA Big Collection.

The University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries are pleased to announce that we have signed a cost neutral, three-year “Read and Publish” agreement with Cambridge University Press (CUP) in collaboration with our consortial partner NERL (formerly known as NorthEast Regional Libraries). This is the first Read and Publish deal for the Libraries, and became effective 1 January 2022. Under this CUP Read and Publish agreement, UMD authors may publish articles as gold Open Access without paying an Article Processing Charge (APC).

The University of Maryland Libraries has adopted a set of core licensing principles to guide negotiations with scholarly publishers and other vendors. The principles support the mission, vision, and values of the University and of the Libraries.

Section body - TOME@UMD, a two-year pilot program of the national TOME initiative, is now accepting applications for three grants of up to $15,000 each that will sponsor the publication of open access, digital monographs by UMD faculty members. With a deadline of November 15, 2021, the process calls for applications from eligible faculty in all disciplines, but with preference given for those in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. 

The partnership offers UMD researchers a new portal to manage projects and collaborate across institutions.