Why would university faculty choose to place their scholarship on electronic archives for a world-wide audience? Many US universities have adopted such mandates for public access to faculty research, perhaps most notably Harvard [1], MIT, and the University of Kansas [2]. These policies (and many more like them in various stages of consideration on campuses across the nation and world) are harbingers of a new order, one in which essentially all scholarly articles can be found and accessed by any interested individual.
This spring, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Coalition for Networked Information sent a document entitled “The Research University’s Role in the Dissemination of Research and Scholarship,” [3] to all public and private US research universities, requesting that serious campus discussion on the topic occur. The document resulted from a roundtable of officers of the four associations and 21 provosts, research officers and librarians, and university press representatives, invited from their member universities. There is much to be gained by enlarging the universe of those who have full access to scholarship. Ubiquitous campus public-access deposit mandates will rapidly generate this gain.
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