Kudos to the University of Calgary Library Faculty for their Open Access Mandate! Details are available at Open Access in Libraries & Cultural Resources, featuring a picture of Canadian librarian OA activist Andrew Waller seated at the desk.
This is a faculty-led mandate, in which Libraries & Cultural Resource staff commit to making their own work open access.
Text of the mandate:
As an active member of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary endorses the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration.
LCR academic staff members believe that the output of our scholarly activities should be as widely disseminated and openly available as possible. Our scholarly output includes but is not limited to journal articles, books and book chapters, presentations if substantial, conference papers and proceedings, and datasets.
Effective April 17, 2009, LCR academic staff commit to
* Deposit their scholarly output in the University of Calgary’s open access scholarly repository
* Promote Open Access on campus and assist scholars in making their research openly available
* Where possible, publish their research in an open-access journal"
Thanks to the University of Calgary Libraries and Cultural Resources for yet another example of Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement. Note that this is an inititiative that any library can take, without waiting for the university as a whole to adopt a mandate. This will provide a great training ground so that the library will be well prepared to provide support when the institution-wide mandate is adopted. This is assuming that every institution will eventually adopt an open access mandate; the benefits of OA to the institution are so compelling that my position is that ubiquitous institutional OA mandates are a matter of time (and hard work on advocacy, of course). For evidence of this coming ubiquitous OA mandate, see this post on the European University Association unanimous commitment to OA policy development.
