Colorado College
AC-11: Open Access to Research

Colorado College's Intellectual Property and Copyright policy "encourages the creation and dissemination of creative and intellectual work." It states the college's support for the concept of open access, and encourages faculty to use Creative Commons licenses to retain copyright but allow freer sharing of scholarly work. However, open access to research is done on a voluntary basis; faculty must choose to opt in. Colorado College's Tutt Library paid $2,507 for SPARC Membership from January – December 30 2017 and $1,070 for BioMedCentral Supporter Membership July 2017 – June 2018. BMC supporting membership gives CC faculty a 15% discount on article processing charges for publishing in BMC and Springer Open journals. SPARC more generally advocates for open access publishing, but doesn’t give our faculty any discounts. We previously had a membership to PLOS for $500 a year and CC faculty authors would get a discount on article publishing. PLOS changed its model in 2013 and no longer has institutional memberships.

"Colorado College supports the concept of open access to scholarly work and encourages faculty, students, and staff to share their intellectual property."

The library maintains the digital archives of CC, which allows open access to faculty research, student theses and other publications produced at Colorado College. Submissions are voluntary, and the archive is maintained by library staff. Digital CC is an archival, institutional digital repository that collects and preserves the creative and intellectual output of the CC community. CC collects publications of all kinds from across campus, including those created by students, faculty and staff. Annual reports, statistics, theses, newspapers, flyers, posters, student projects and more are collected in PDF format. The library also collect films (MP4s) and audio files (MP3s) as well as photographs (TIFFs and JPEGs). Just as the library's archives (located in Special Collections) has collected and preserved the print history of the College for over a hundred years, Digital CC now preserves this history in the digital age.

Colorado College has a policy stating that it "supports the concept of open access to scholarly work and encourages faculty, students, and staff to share their intellectual property" (https://www.coloradocollege.edu/basics/welcome/leadership/policies/intellectual-property-and-copyright). Faculty, staff, and students are encouraged to share their scholarly work. The Digital Archives of Colorado College (https://digitalcc.coloradocollege.edu/islandora/object/coccc%3Aroot) is the college’s repository for storing research data and allowing open access. However, there is no formal policy assuring open access to scholarly work in any department. Open Access Percentage Data from Diane Westerfield Methodology 1. Ran a search on Web of Science with Colorado Coll as Organization-Enhanced field, and date limited to 2016. Result : 87 hits. 2. Exported the result set to RefWorks and exported from there to an Excel spreadsheet. 3. Checked each citation for CC Faculty authorship. Excluded students and staff; and people not associated with CC in 2016, but did include a retired CC professor, and visiting faculty who taught in 2016. Also excluded citations which turned out to be disqualified such as being a poster session or being some type of reprint or date error in Web of Science. Result set down to 71. 4. Searched each title in quotes in Google and looked for their presence in open repositories. 7 found in PubMedCentral, 9 found in other open repositories, primarily arxiv.org. Result: 71 divided by 16 = 23% of CC faculty-authored articles placed in open repositories.