Open Access at Cornell University
Among universities in the United States, Cornell University holds a ranking as the 17th best university in America (US News). Founded in 1865, the institution is a leader in most disciplines. They have an impressive body of scholars and innovators among their faculty and students. In 2004-2005, the University Faculty Library Board put forth a resolution to urge faculty to “consider alternative publishing models making scholarly information more accessible and affordable.” This resolution includes the strong encouragement of pursuing open access avenues for sharing research and other scholarly works. The resolution states that “the senate strongly encourages all faculty, and especially tenured faculty, to consider publishing in open access, rather than restricted access, journals reasonably priced journals that make their contents openly accessible shortly” (Cornell, 2013).
Despite Cornell’s support and encouragement of open access practices, they do not have a large open access program or overarching policy for OA. In fact, a 2007 study found that Cornell's own repository “is largely underpopulated and underused by its faculty” and many of its collections sit empty, and those that aren’t empty contain very few items. The only collections that have seen steady growth are those in which the university has already made an administrative investment, “such as requiring deposits of theses and dissertations into DSpace” (Davis).
Cornell has something they call the Cornell Open-Access Publication (COAP) Fund. This fund supports “non-tenured faculty members, academic staff members, and graduate, professional, undergraduate students affiliated with Cornell’s Ithaca campus” and even those who may have completed research during their time at Cornell but left the university by the time of publication. Journals that are open access rely on author fees to cover the cost of publishing work, expenses like the peer-review process and editing. Since 2010, the COAP fund has assisted with processing fees for more than 150 OA publications by more than 100 Cornell scholars across 50+ academic departments on Cornell’s Ithaca campus (Cornell).
There are quite a few caveats to the COAP fund. For starters, not everyone or every article is eligible for support from the fund. Authors must apply to be considered for monies from the fund, and may only request up to $3000 per academic year. The COAP fund also makes clear that it should be considered a last resort, so “publications whose underlying research was funded by grants or gifts that allow funds to be used for processing or publication fees (regardless of whether such fees were included in the budget of the particular grant that support the research) are not eligible for COAP funding. Additional conditions to applying/receiving funding from the COAP program include which OA journals the author can publish to and what components of authored books must be OA (Cornell)
While Cornell is definitely interested in the Open Access movement, it hasn’t made expansive moves towards becoming an open access institution or establishing an Open Access Policy for its institution. It seems to have had a lot of conversations about open access and supports members of its community who want to contribute to OA, but has yet to take the dive.
I propose that Cornell develop a simple open access policy, and go from there. The bare minimum for this policy, however, would require that all Cornell University affiliates deposit work in the DSpace. There are already departments within the institution that require depositing works into Cornell’s open access repository, so taking notes from the verbiage of those policies would be a good first step. It would also be beneficial to gauge the opinions of, and ask for feedback from, faculty within those departments. It would also be wise to take the temperature of faculty and others not within departments that already abide by an OA policy. Implementation will be slow, but doable. In this plan, the directors of the COAP fund would lead the way in navigating an OA policy for the university. As far as the budget is concerned, COAP would need to work with the library and other monetary contributors to determine the feasible speed at which the OA system could grow.
In the beginning stages of the new policy, Cornell would function with green open access, not worrying about peer-review when submitting to their own repository. However, there may be notes made and filters within the repository that allow publications that have been peer-reviewed to be found and sorted. The major benefit to this plan and this type of policy is that it will propel Cornell further into the OA realm and its scholars can contribute to the collective open access knowledge pool. Not requiring peer-review makes it a lot easier for the repository (DSpace) to grow at a faster rate. Of course, the risks with this plan are that there could be push back from faculty or administration for varying reasons, and policy will gridlock and lose momentum. And the risk with green open access is that the quality of publications will decrease. I would measure success for this particular institution by looking at percentage of repository growth across disciplines and percentage growth in the number of times a Cornell publication was cited.
References:
Cornell University. (n.d.). COAP Frequently Asked Questions. Cornell University Library. Retrieved November 2, 2021
Cornell University, & University Faculty Library Board. (2013). Resolution 48: University Faculty Library Board on Scholarly Publishing | Dean of Faculty. Cornell University Dean of Faculty Office. https://theuniversityfaculty.cornell.edu/faculty-senate/archives-and-actions/current2-draft/resolution-48-university-faculty-library-board-on-scholarly-publishing/
Davis, P., & Connolly, M. (2007). Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-Use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace. D-Lib Magazine, ISSN 1082-9873, Vol. 13, Nº. 3-4, 2007. 13. 10.1045/march2007-davis.
US NEWS. (n.d.). Cornell University - Profile, Rankings and Data | US News Best Colleges. U.S. News and World Report: Education. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/cornell-university-2711
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