A policy, passed by Faculty Senate, that grants the university specific copyright permissions to upload faculty’s author accepted manuscripts into AU’s institutional repository, AURA.

For faculty, this creates a legal pathway to make a version of your research open access. Open access publishing has multiple benefits, including:

• Increased citations over time
• More diverse uses of your research, including practitioner and policy use, which aligns with the university’s translated research and public impact goals

No! This policy grants the university permissions BEFORE any publishing agreement is signed – it is up to publishers to respond to this policy to ensure that your agreement with them complies with AU policy, but it is helpful to let a publisher know about this policy before signing an agreement.

Yes, many! Nearly 900 institutions worldwide have passed similar policies.

This policy nicely complements our other forms of support, including the library’s Open Access Fund to pay author fees for fully open access journals and our agreements with publishers to publish AU-authored journal articles open access with no additional fees.

Faculty have the option to opt out for individual articles by self-completing a waiver online.

Two things:

1. All faculty must sign a statement confirming agreement with the policy. This helps protect you and the university in the event of legal action.
2. Faculty will be responsible for ensuring that the manuscript is made available by sending it to appropriate designees in the library and/or their unit. Faculty are welcome to upload materials to AURA directly, but are not required to do so.

Yes. Harvard has put together a nice summary of the legal standing, and General Counsel has confirmed that this policy does not interfere with our intellectual property policy.

Please contact Rachel Borchardt, Scholarly Communications Librarian, borchard@american.edu.