University of Illinois Chicago
AC-11: Access to Research

The University does not have an open access policy at the time. However, as a result of the State of Illinois's open access to research act" the University of Illinois at Chicago, in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Illinois at Springfield, is developing a policy. This will likely occur in the next 6- 9 months. The NIH Public Access policy (NIH PAP) is one of the one most prominent policies that assures open access to research publications. The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. Researchers are required to submit journal articles that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central. The policy requires that these articles be publicly accessible in order to advance science and improve human health. Almost all colleges have faculty that have NIH funding, with the most prominent ones being Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing, Allied Health, Pharmacy and Public Health. The law states "The NIH Public Access Policy implements Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008) which states: SEC. 218. The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication." Faculty who receive funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) or from the Institute of Education Science (IES), also need to make their articles publicly available within 6 to 12 months of publication.

While the University does not have an open access policy, it is expected one will be created in the next 6-9 months. UIC has a repository, INDIGO, where scholarly Intellectual property in DIGital form is made available online in an open environment. INDIGO collects, disseminates, and provides persistent and reliable access to the research and scholarship of faculty, staff and students at UIC. Faculty, staff and graduate students can deposit their research and scholarship-unpublished, and in many cases, published-directly into INDIGO. Departments can also use INDIGO to distribute their working papers, technical reports, or other research material.

The University Library supports open access to research in many ways. One opportunity is the ability for faculty to self archive their publications in INDIGO, UIC's institutional repository. In addition, the library has an Open Access journal publishing platform where 5 journals are currently published. Two of these journals are also archived in PubMed Central. There are also several open access memberships (BMC, HINDAWI), which allow University authors to get discounts on the open access publishing fees when they publish in these journals. There is also an Open Access fund (ROAAP) where authors can apply for funds to use for open access publishing. The funds are provided by the University Library, the Provost's Office, and the the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research).