Statement in Support of Open Access and
Open Educational Resources

Approved by The Ames Library faculty (11/5/21) and Library Advisory Committee (11/12/21)

“Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” (Suber)

“Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.” (UNESCO)

The Ames Library supports open access (OA) scholarly publishing and open educational resources by

• Providing an institutional repository, Digital Commons @ IWU, where faculty and student scholarship is openly accessible and readily discoverable.
• Supporting faculty who wish to create and/or share open content with funding, technical support using the SelectedWorks platform.
• Creating digital collections that enhance access to our special collections and archives as well as faculty and student research and creative activity.
• Contributing metadata or items to open access digital collections such as the Internet Archive and the Digital Public Library of America.
• Subscribing to publications of not-for-profit publishers when those publishers are trying to move toward OA publishing. 
• Supporting staff who acquire, catalog, and process open materials to improve discovery of open content.
• Collaborating with CARLI to ensure that our library systems provide robust discovery of open content as well as paid content.
• Monitoring regional, national, and international trends and developments in OA and OER, sharing our knowledge and expertise with the campus community for purposes of scholarship and pedagogy.
• Integrating open resources and tools into instruction sessions for students to build their awareness of the economics of content creation, access, and licensing.
• Contributing collections funds in support of select OA initiatives.
• Examples of initiatives for consideration include: Open Library of Humanities , Lever Press , Open Book Publishers , Open Access Network ,  PeerJ , BioMed Central , the Directory of Open Access Journals , Internet Archive , and Knowledge Unlatched .
• Continuing memberships in advocacy organizations such as the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC), the Open Educational Network through CARLI.
• Participating in research or professional activities that support open, such as the Open Illinois Hub and Digital POWRR.

Criteria against which open initiatives are assessed for support: 

• Type of funding (institutional support, grant funding, article processing charges, other)
• Business plan for long-term sustainability
• Relevance of content to the liberal arts curriculum
• Cost of participation
• Availability of usage statistics
• Ability to participate in governance
• Integration of workflows with distribution outlets
• Inclusion of metadata in discovery systems
• Archiving practices that include preservation strategies
• User interface
• Local and global benefits