Florida State University
AC-11: Open Access to Research

Florida State University strives to "preserve, expand and disseminate knowledge." One manner of achieving that goal is for Florida State University authors to make their research available as open access. Florida State University joins other universities in the United States and Europe in offering its authors access to funding to assist with publication charges for open access journals and books.

The FSU Faculty Senate adopted an open access policy on February 17, 2016, ensuring that future scholarly articles authored by FSU faculty will be made available to the public at no charge. This policy demonstrates the commitment of our faculty to disseminating the fruits of their research and scholarship as widely as possible, and promises to increase authors’ rights, readership, and citation rates. The waiver provision ensures that all faculty have the freedom to publish in the journal of their choice.

The FSU Office of Digital Research and Scholarship at the University Libraries specializes in academic publishing and open access. The launch of DigiNole: FSU’s Research Repository comes on the heels of the OA Policy, and provides faculty with a platform for making their research publicly available online. DigiNole is an open access repository, which allows anyone to view the scholarship contained within it. By making all of FSU’s articles available in repositories like DigiNole, scholars and researchers can increase the visibility and impact of their research by 50-500%, according to several studies. Faculty can track their impact more easily with DigiNole, since faculty who deposit their scholarship get monthly readership reports with analytics on the use of their scholarship. Having easy access to these numbers can help with hiring and promotion, as it gives faculty concrete and tangible evidence of their impact.

Purpose
Provide the broadest possible access to the journal literature authored by FSU faculty.

Policy Statement
The Faculty of Florida State University, consistent with the University’s mission to “preserve, expand and disseminate knowledge,”¹ is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. As such, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to Florida State University permission to make available his or her scholarly articles² and to exercise the copyright in those articles, except when a Faculty member expressly waives this grant of rights. More specifically, each Faculty member grants to Florida State University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.³ The policy applies to all scholarly articles authored or coauthored while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost’s designee⁴ will waive application of the license for a particular article or delay access for a specified period of time upon express direction by a Faculty member.
Each faculty member who does not request a waiver of the licensing requirement as described above will provide an electronic copy of his or her final version of each article (i.e., the “final author’s version post-peer review” or the “final published version” where possible) to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office.
The Provost’s designee may make the article available to the public in DigiNole, Florida State University’s institutional research repository. The Office of the Provost will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty Senate. After three years, the Faculty Senate Library Committee will review the policy and present a report on behalf of the Faculty Senate.

The Open Access Publishing Fund supports publishing costs for eligible open access (OA) journals and books when no alternative funding is available, thereby fostering the exploration of new and innovative publishing models. Faculty, post-docs, and researchers are eligible to apply. The maximum allocation is $1,500 per publication.

Other ways FSU Libraries is working to increase open access publishing include becoming a supporting institutional member of the following open access organizations:
- Luminos: Luminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs, with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as their traditional program. FSU-affiliated faculty authors enjoy a 10% discount on the Title Publication Fee.
- Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI): MDPI publishes 160 diverse peer-reviewed, scientific, open access journals. FSU-affiliated authors receive a 25% discount on article processing charges (APCs).
- Open Libraries of Humanities: The OLH is a not-for-profit enterprise with the sole mission of advancing open access to scholarship in the humanities. FSU-affiliated authors can publish in any OLH journal without paying APCs or other fees.

https://www.lib.fsu.edu/page/open-access-publishing-fund

Florida State Open Publishing provides publishing services for journals, monographs, open educational resources, and digital scholarship projects. We consult on a variety of scholarly publishing topics and digital research tools and methodologies. We aim to provide open access publishing expertise, services, and platforms to enhance the scholarly output of Florida State University students, faculty, and staff.

Services:
Journal and monograph hosting
Copyright and licensing guidance
Indexing and discovery support
Usage metrics and altmetrics
Light layout and typesetting
DOI, ISSN, ISBN registration
Digital preservation
Digital scholarship consultation

The FSU Libraries launched FSU’s first open-access publishing program in March of 2021. Florida State Open Publishing (FSOP) provides the university’s faculty, students and staff with the digital publishing tools and support needed to produce peer-reviewed, open scholarly publications, educational resources and other digital research outputs. Created to address gaps in traditional scholarly publishing, FSOP aims to make FSU’s scholarly output more accessible, diverse and innovative. Designed to serve as an alternative to commercial academic publishers, FSOP is a digitally focused, fully open-access publishing program that supports a diverse range of publications and projects, including experimental scholarship and student research. The program offers platform hosting, technical support and other publishing support services for peer-reviewed journals, open textbooks, monographs, research reports, conference proceedings and additional forms of digital scholarly publishing. FSOP welcomes projects from all disciplines, languages and FSU-affiliated authors regardless of the scope of their work. Founded on principles of inclusivity and diversity, the program is particularly interested in promoting scholarship by or about underrepresented groups. FSOP’s publications are released under flexible copyright licenses that allow authors to retain their copyrights, enabling them to share their work with colleagues and research communities to reuse their work in innovative ways.

The Open Access Policy covers all scholarly articles authored by FSU faculty across all colleges and departments. FSU faculty are encouraged to submit new articles to the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship for DigiNole. Policy information can be found here: http://openaccess.fsu.edu/policy-text