Open Access and Scholarly Communication

Colorado State University Libraries' Faculty Open Access Commitment

By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

---Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2001

Preamble

The Colorado State University Libraries’ Faculty believes that the free exchange of information and ideas is vital to scholarly discourse.  Open Access to scholarly communication accelerates the creation of knowledge while simultaneously increasing the visibility of research results. Members of the academic community share a common interest in the broadest possible dissemination of peer-reviewed literature and other products of the scholarly process.

Traditional publishing practices inhibit the free dissemination of scholarly work; university library collection budgets are increasingly strained by the rising costs of journals and databases.  Open publishing models reduce financial pressure on libraries while expanding access to scholarly information, ensuring its long-term accessibility and maintaining scholarly standards of quality. 

The Colorado State University Libraries Faculty endorse the principles of Open Access and seek to make our research as openly available and widely distributed as possible.

Statement of Commitment

We, the faculty of Colorado State University Libraries, support open access to our scholarly publications.

Libraries faculty will:

1. Disseminate their scholarship broadly by making it openly accessible, online and free of charge when possible.
   
   
2. Actively seek publishers whose policies allow research to be made freely available online.
   
   
3. Engage in good faith negotiations with all publishers to allow deposit of pre- or post-print versions of all forms of published scholarly works in Colorado State University’s institutional repository, Digital Collections of Colorado. This applies to all forms of published scholarly work, including:
   
   

   journal articles books/book chapters conference proceedings

   reviews substantial presentations internal reports