Towards open access at the University of Minnesota

• The statement on this page outlines the Libraries beliefs and values regarding OA. The Senate Library Committee issued a statement of support on November 16, 2021. 

The University of Minnesota Libraries works to achieve an open and diverse scholarly publishing system that enables the University’s research to be freely available as a public good.

Open access (OA) provides equitable access to research—anyone, anywhere, can access and use research—enabling new ideas to be spread more rapidly and widely, accelerating further research.

The Libraries’ support for OA is a cornerstone of our commitment to ensure the greatest possible scholarly and public access to the research and scholarship produced by the University community. Therefore:

We encourage UMN authors to retain rights to their published works and educate them about publication agreements.

We inform authors on how to use the University of Minnesota’s Open Access Policy to achieve their publishing goals.

We facilitate “green” OA through our repository, the University Digital Conservancy (UDC). 

We support pathways for materials to be OA upon publication through Libraries Publishing Services, our OA partnerships, and by advocating for sustainable OA business models.

We prioritize open access publishing models through collection development strategies that are open, equitable, transparent, and sustainable. These models:

• Demonstrate a clear path for moving to a fully OA future;
• Align with our commitment to equity and diversity, including an imperative to ensure publicly funded research is made openly available to all members of the public;
• Enable researchers to preserve their funding for direct research activities rather than for publication fees;
• Use transparent, equitable pricing structures that pay for the cost of scholarly publishing and reasonable service development, helping us meet our obligations to be responsible stewards of University budgets;
• Allow for sustainable cost increases;
• Provide equitable opportunities for all authors to publish and read scholarly literature, regardless of institutional affiliation, funding status, or discipline;
• In the case of journals, eliminate the revenue stream of article processing charges (APCs), which are often paid on top of subscriptions.

We believe that true transformation of the scholarly publishing system should:

• Support academy-owned publishing infrastructure so that scholars and academic organizations are in control of production;
• Require cooperative action and distribute costs equitably. “Subscribe to Open” is one such model that accommodates these priorities.
• Allow for innovation to move from traditional models to next generation publishing formats, such as post-publication peer review (e.g., PubPeer) or overlay journals (e.g., The Open Journal of Astrophysics) that aggregate a collection of publications into something resembling a traditional journal issue.

This statement is available in the University Digital Conservancy.