Open Access is an international movement that has the goal of making peer-reviewed published scholarship available free of charge to the public and to the global scholarly community.
For additional reading about open access in general we recommend Wikipedia's well-referenced Open Access article.
The College Art Association has published the final version of its Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts (pdf), a set of principles targeted towards visual arts professionals that outlines how fair use can be implemented when using copyrighted material in the field of visual art.
A new grant program has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to republish out-of-print humanities books under Creative Commons licenses. The Humanities Open Book program will give teachers, students, and the public digital access to valuable works in literature, history, art, philosophy, and music that are currently out of print.
The University of Kansas Libraries have signed the Lyon Declaration on Access to Information and Development.
The Center for Media and Social Impact released a report this month outlining best practices for sharing of orphan works by libraries and archives. Orphan works are scholarly works for which the copyright holder is unknown or cannot be found. This document, the first of its kind, is the result of a 2012 workshop that brought together dozens of archival professionals from across the United States to address copyright considerations pertaining to sharing orphan works.
14,890
The number of researchers to date that have signed the pledge not to publish, review, or serve on editorial boards for Elsevier journals
86
The number of scholarly communities in KU ScholarWorks
40,795
The number of times that the most popular KU ScholarWorks item--THE ROLE OF ADAPTOR PROTEIN GADS IN CD8+ T CELL-MEDIATED IMMUNITY--has been downloaded or viewed since 2007
2009
The year that the KU Open Access Policy was approved by the Faculty Senate
3,824,477
The number of times that items in KU ScholarWorks have been downloaded since 2007
4,371,923
The number of searches performed in KU ScholarWorks since 2009
324
(and growing) The number of dissertations and theses in the Pre-1923 Dissertations and Theses collection at http://hdl.handle.net/1808/7158
The KU Faculty Open Access Policy (revised and passed the faculty senate on February 11, 2010) is a mechanism that asserts the rights of KU faculty to provide broad, free access to their journal publications to colleagues around the world.
Under the policy, KU faculty can exercise these rights by retaining enough copyrights and once rights are retained provide KU with the necessary bibliographic information and a copy of the publication. KU then provides efficient and effective access to these publications by means of KU ScholarWorks. If a publisher requires a faculty member to opt out of the policy for a specific article, the author may submit an Open Access Policy Waiver Form.
