Toward Open Access: it takes a village

Abstract

Academics and librarians have worked in tandem for many years to broaden access to the scholarship they create, scrutinize, collect, and consume. Recent developments have focused on campus faculty advocating for change by developing self-imposed open access policies. Such policy developments have occurred in an evolutionary process, the beginnings of which might be identified as the “serials crisis” peaking in the 1990’s, followed by the focus on efforts to examine and reform broken aspects of the system of scholarly communication, and most recently the feasibility of faculty-initiated open access policies on university campuses. This paper provides an analysis of one university’s ten year evolution to an open access policy focusing primarily on its advocates’ lessons learned and the library’s role in order to add the perspective of a public institution’s experience.