Emory's Open Access Policy

Open Access Policy Text 

The Faculty of Emory University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In addition to the public benefit of such dissemination, this policy is intended to serve faculty interests by promoting greater reach and impact for articles, assisting authors' retention of distribution rights, and ensuring preservation.

In keeping with these commitments, the Faculty calls upon Emory University, through its Libraries, to create an open access repository of faculty authored scholarly articles¹. Each faculty member² grants to Emory University permission to capture and make available his or her scholarly articles the author has chosen to distribute as open access and to reproduce and distribute those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to Emory University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles the author has chosen to distribute as open access, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The Emory Faculty author remains the copyright owner unless that author chooses to transfer the copyright to a publisher.

Scholarly articles authored or co-authored while anyone is a member of the Faculty would be eligible for deposit in the repository unless the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement, such as transferring all copyrights to a publisher. Emory Faculty may embargo scholarly articles from distribution for a specified period of time if a publishing agreement made by the Faculty member is determined to be incompatible with immediate distribution in Emory's repository.

To assist the University in distributing the scholarly articles, each Faculty member may choose to provide an electronic copy of the final author's version of the article at no charge to the Libraries in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Libraries. The Libraries may make the article available to the public in Emory's open access repository. In cases where an embargo period has been specified, the article may be archived in an Emory repository without open access for the period of the embargo, or a complete citation for the article may be submitted when deposit in the repository is incompatible with an assignment made by the faculty member.

This policy applies to scholarly articles for which the faculty author is copyright owner as defined in Emory's Intellectual Property Policy (Policy 7.6). Any question as to whether a faculty member is the copyright owner of a scholarly article shall be resolved as provided in Emory's Intellectual Property Policy.

The Faculty calls upon the Library Policy Committee (LPC), the Provost's Office and the Libraries, in collaboration with the Faculty Council, to develop and monitor an implementation plan for this policy. The LPC and Libraries, in consultation with the Provost's Office, will submit annual reports to Faculty Council for the first three years of the policy implementation. The policy and service model will be reviewed after three years and a recommendation on revisions to the policy presented to the Faculty Council.

1. A scholarly article is defined here as in the Budapest Open Access Initiative, that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. This encompasses peer-reviewed journal articles, and any unreviewed preprints which they may wish to put online. (https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/)

2. For the purposes of this policy, a Faculty member is a person employed at Emory under the Faculty Handbook with either a continuous or limited appointment. (https://provost.emory.edu/faculty/policies-guidelines/handbook/index.html)