On April 15, 2013, the faculty of Grinnell College approved the following policy on open access publishing:
That the Faculty of Grinnell College, being committed to disseminating the results of our research, scholarship, and teaching as widely as possible, agree to:
1. Grant to Grinnell College permission to make our scholarly journal articles openly accessible in the College’s institutional repository (Digital Grinnell). We will request changes to our publication contracts to permit this. In legal terms, the permission granted by each faculty member is an irrevocable, nonexclusive, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise all rights under copyright for purposes of making our scholarly articles openly accessible in an institutional repository, and to authorize other parties to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for income or profit.
In making this agreement, we recognize that publishers vary in their willingness to negotiate terms of copyright and that circumstances vary for each member of the faculty. The Dean of the College, or the Dean's designate, will waive this license upon request of the author.
This agreement will apply to all scholarly journal articles published while the author is a member of the Faculty except for: any articles published before the adoption of this policy; any articles for which the faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy; or any articles for which the author requests a waiver. (Scholarly articles are understood to be articles published in peer-reviewed journals.)
Each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the author’s fi nal version of each accepted article for which no waiver has been obtained no later than the date of its publication. The electronic copy will go to the appropriate representative of the Dean of the College’s of fi ce in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Dean of the College’s of fi ce.
The Dean of the College will be responsible for implementing this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time.
2. Call upon the Libraries to provide assistance in the review and negotiation of those contracts, and upon the College to ensure support for an open-access digital repository.
3. Encourage scholarly authors, reviewers, and editors at Grinnell to inform themselves about the state of scholarly publishing in their disciplines. We also call on the Libraries to provide information about publisher policies and the state of scholarly publishing, and to assist authors, reviewers, and editors in these investigations.
4. Encourage faculty and staff to provide, in addition, bibliographical data and, where possible, the full text, of any scholarly or professional publication (scholarly articles, chapters and essays in edited volumes, reference articles, non-peer-reviewed articles, and monographs), for inclusion in the College's institutional repository. The repository will provide links to the final published versions of all publications.
5. Encourage faculty to post syllabi and other teaching materials in Digital Grinnell and other openly accessible digital spaces and to adopt Creative Commons licenses for these works. We call upon the College to provide appropriate digital platforms and other assistance.
6. Call upon the President to sign, on behalf of the College, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge and the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. This would explicitly and publicly encourage authors at Grinnell to grant to all users of their scholarly and educational works free right of access and license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the works publicly and to make and distribute derivative works subject to proper attribution of authorship. It would also explicitly and publicly encourage College departments that hold artifacts and other cultural heritage materials to provide open digital access to their collections.