Why open access? The policy environment and process on one university campus

Abstract

When the Academic Council at Duke University adopted an open access policy in March 2010, they both enacted a legal mechanism for archiving scholarship in Duke’s institutional repository and expressed a set of values in regard to access to research. From the legal perspective, the policy grants to the University a license to archive all peer-reviewed scholarly articles in the DukeSpace repository, which is managed by the University Libraries. That license is broad, but there were clear limitations on its implementation expressed by the Academic Council. From the point of view of values, this policy is a clear statement that research is undertaken for the benefit of society as a whole, and that improving access to the products of that research is beneficial to the researchers themselves, to the University and to the global community. This article explores the path Duke followed to develop and implement such a policy.