# OISE/University of Toronto gets an Open Access policy!


![OA
logo](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Screen-Shot-2012-04-22-at-10.31.09.png "Screen Shot 2012-04-22 at 10.31.09")On
February 15, 2012, the Faculty Council at the Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education at the University of Toronto formally (and I
believe unanimously)
[passed](http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/oise/About_OISE/openaccess_20120419.html)
an [Open Access
Policy](http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/research/UserFiles/File/OA_Policy.pdf).
I believe this is the first faculty at the University of Toronto to pass
an Open Access policy.

The policy refers to both idealistic reasons, such as the institute's
commitment to increasing access to its research, as well as pragmatic
reasons, with more and more funders requiring Open Access (such as
[CIHR](http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/193.html)). The key part of [the
policy](http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/research/UserFiles/File/OA_Policy.pdf),
after the pre-amble and before some explanations, is this:

> *For any scholarly article accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed
> journal, faculty members are encouraged to retain or obtain the right
> to deposit and to deposit the article electronically into T- Space,
> the University of Toronto’s research repository, along with
> non-exclusive permission to preserve and freely disseminate it.
> Support is available for this process; faculty members are encouraged
> to provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at
> no charge to the appropriate representative of the OISE/UT Library,
> who will make the article available to the public in T-Space, the open
> access repository operated by the University of Toronto Libraries. *

This policy is the result of more than three years of work led by a
group of people in the "Research Standing Committee Open Access
sub-committee", which included discussions in the Research Standing
Committee and Faculty Council, as well as an [open Town Hall
meeting](http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/oise/UserFiles/File/TownHallFlyer.pdf) (see
[recording of the entire
meeting](http://142.150.98.64/OISE/20101119-121753-1/rnh.htm), or just
[my 5 minute appeal](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVBWvBAyZFE)).
Originally it began life as a "mandate", modeled on, and inspired by the
mandates at [Harvard](http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/policies),
[MIT](http://libraries.mit.edu/sites/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-access-at-mit/mit-open-access-policy/)
and [Stanford School of
Education](http://ed.stanford.edu/faculty-research/open-archive/oapolicy).
This work got a boost by [a very spirited presentation by John
Willinsky](https://vimeo.com/40979206) during Open Access Week 2009.

In the end, however, this turned out to be very difficult, with the
mandate being challenged by university lawyers, the faculty union,
questions about whether the Faculty Council had the authority to approve
it, etc. Finally, we decided to go for a much-watered down "policy" to
at least get some movement.

Because of the way academia works in North America, any mandate would
anyway be quite toothless given the required opt-out clauses. Thus, no
matter what the actual policy says, much of the work is in creating a
*culture of Open Access*, providing technical support for submitting,
coming up with guidelines and workflows, and changing mindsets.

There have been a wide range of events during the past few years to
popularize Open Access at University of Toronto and at OISE, including
[Open Access Week](http://www.openaccessweek.org/) in
[2009](http://discover.library.utoronto.ca/open-access-week/open-access-events-2009), [2010](http://discover.library.utoronto.ca/open-access-week/open-access-events)
and [2011](http://onesearch.library.utoronto.ca/oaweek).

![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/4098198609_a9d5872645.jpg "4098198609_a9d5872645")

There has also been much practical work done with making T-Space easier
to use (although we have a long way to go there), exposing statistics,
etc. The library, with support from the Open Access sub-committee has
created [guidelines for OISE faculty to deposit in
T-Space](http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/ec/UserFiles/File/OISEFacultyUsersGuideDRAFT(2).pdf),
and hired work-for-study students to help faculty deposit their
publications.

So much has been done, but much more remains to be done. It's
interesting to contrast the relative inertia of the field of education,
with other fields such as the hard sciences, computer science or
medicine. Despite a great interest in [knowledge
mobilization](http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/rspe/) at OISE, not many see
the connections between this and Open Access.

It's especially funny for such a "radical" institution, where many
professors are feminists and activists writing about popular education
movements in Latin America, the Occupy Wall-Street movements, etc. Yet,
how many of them have even heard about the growing movement of over
10,000 scientists who have [vowed to boycott ~~Springer~~
Elsevier](http://thecostofknowledge.com/)? And what are we doing about
Taylor and Francis, which in many cases give us fewer rights to
self-archive than ~~Springer~~ Elsevier does? (T&F are behind 70% of the
journals that OISE faculty publish in).

One policy down, lot's of work left to do! :)

Stian