Faculty at the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) decided on a policy that requires them to grant
open-access rights to their scholarly papers. The move will make their work
more readily available and help simplify the copyright process, according to a
report in Campus Technology.
Copyright issues are a big reason for the new
policy because it prevents publishers of the many journals in which Caltech
research appears from suing authors who post their content to their own online
sites or the institute’s online repository. It also complies with a directive
from the United States Office of Science and Technology that requires federally
funded research be made available for free within a year of publication.
Caltech faculty will continue to publish in
academic journals and can still grant exclusive rights to their work; they just
need to request a waiver from the policy.
“Ideas are most powerful when they are free
to move, not held behind a screen until they are purchased from a vendor,” said
Brenda Fultz, professor or material science and applied physics at Caltech.
“The new open-access policy at Caltech increases the impact of our ideas by
better connecting them to the information society around us.”
