In 2013, the faculty of Grinnell College, a small liberal arts college in Iowa, voted to approve the college’s Open Access Resolution, which requires deposit of peer-reviewed scholarly articles produced by faculty in the digital institutional repository. There is a waiver process for faculty who cannot meet the requirements of the resolution, and the waiver must be approved by the Dean of the College. The mandate only extends to articles, although faculty are encouraged to deposit other types of scholarly production including syllabi, book chapters, and monographs. While the resolution calls upon the library to assist in publisher negotiations, the onus of communicating with publishers is on the faculty.
Given that this resolution was approved by faculty vote, we can assume that there is significant buy-in from both administration and faculty and an assessment plan can focus largely on identifying pain points in the current system and adding potential solutions. But first, the basics: since the resolution went into effect almost 10 years ago, it would be important to see how compliance rates have changed (or not) over the years. An assessment of how many articles were deposited and how many waivers approved (and ideally how many articles escaped the process entirely, although this could be time-consuming to capture) each year would be useful to know both for the college overall and at the department level. If some departments have much lower rates of deposit, this could be worth further outreach. This data could also be benchmarked against peer institutions to show areas where Grinnell has been particularly successful or unsuccessful.
After this stage, it would be important to collect stakeholder input. This could take the form of faculty surveys or focus groups as well as surveys or focus groups for librarians who have been involved in implementing the open access resolution. An anonymous survey may be more appropriate to gauge whether early career faculty are worried about the policy’s impact on their tenure application, while focus groups would be ideal for hearing impact stories. These assessments would be aimed towards identifying points of friction in current processes as well as possible solutions and potential expansions of the policy into the future.
Some potential outcomes from this assessment would be renewed sense of agency from faculty and librarians and recommendations for new or tweaked services, resources or policies to aid in the implementation of the open access resolution. A report on the successes and challenges of the college’s open access policy could be written and published (open access, of course) to engage with the broader conversation around open access at SLACs, which are not the primary focus of literature on open access in higher education. A town hall or faculty meeting should also be planned to share the results of the assessment with stakeholders and propose or solicit some ways forward.
I also think that while soliciting input from faculty and librarians it is important to look forward as well as back. Are faculty interested in working towards expanding the mandate to include other kind of literature? What would they need to feel that such an expansion was feasible? Do librarians see opportunities for new areas of growth or collaboration? Allowing stakeholders to look forward and dream big can result in better morale, higher levels of investment, and can start the process of solidifying or expanding the open access policy at Grinnell College for the long term, at the vanguard of SLACs.
I, Sara Kittleson, have neither given nor received aid while working on this assignment. I have completed the graded portion BEFORE looking at anyone else's work on this assignment.