Open Access at KU

KU Faculty Senate Open Access Policy

The first formal step taken by KU faculty and academic staff toward an open access policy was the Faculty Senate’s 2005 Resolution on Access to Scholarly Information (pdf), which encouraged deposit of scholarly works into KU ScholarWorks and signaled the faculty’s interest in and support for open access. In 2009 and 2010, Faculty Senate passed the KU Faculty Open Access Policy, asserting rights to make their scholarly articles openly accessible. KU is the first public institution to adopt an open access policy, after examples set by Harvard, MIT, and Stanford’s School of Education. As of 2025, faculty at over 100 US universities, public and private, have adopted similar policies, often with the support of the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI), which KU Libraries co-founded in 2011. As the Provost’ Designate under the policy, the Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communication & Copyright supports faculty and academic staff in a variety of ways to make their scholarly work open and visible.  

To best leverage the Open Access Policy, faculty and academic staff should affirm the license. Occasionally a publisher may require a faculty member to opt out of the Policy for a specific article, in which case the author may submit an Open Access Policy Waiver Form.

If you consider yourself an OA advocate and would like to be informed about relevant news and events, contact lib_oscc@ku.edu to let us know you'd like to be added to the KU OA Friends list.