Middlebury College
AC-11: Access to Research

Digital copies of faculty publications can be found, read and downloaded by anyone with an internet connection. Repositories are indexed by search engines and databases such as Google Scholar, which link to the downloadable version of a deposited article. These kinds of repositories currently exist at dozens of institutions that have adopted open access policies.

The new policy does not require faculty to change where they publish their work and it does not require them to include their work in the new repository. It does, however, make inclusion in the repository the default process unless a faculty member opts out by waiver.

The faculty members of Middlebury College are committed to broad dissemination of their research and scholarship. Therefore, faculty members grant Middlebury College permission to exercise the copyright in their scholarly articles in order to make those articles freely available. More specifically, each faculty member grants to Middlebury College a nonexclusive, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of their scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. Middlebury will grant these rights in turn to the authors themselves, so faculty authors may exercise the same rights. This applies to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored by Middlebury faculty. It does not apply to articles completed before the adoption of this policy, or to articles already under an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement at the time this policy was adopted (May 2016). The granting of this license will have no effect on the copyright ownership of the faculty articles, which remains with the faculty member unless they assign them to another party. This license is revocable at will for individual articles using the process described below.

If directed by a faculty member, the Dean of the Faculty’s Office will automatically waive application of the license for particular articles or delay access for a specified period of time. Faculty members may request waivers at any time. A decision to obtain a waiver or failure to submit an article will have no bearing in annual or other reviews of faculty.

Faculty will provide the author’s final version of each article to the Dean of the Faculty’s Office. Unless the faculty member has obtained a waiver, the Dean of the Faculty’s Office will make the article available to the public in an open-access repository. Otherwise, the article will be stored in the repository for archival purposes.

Middlebury College is a founding member of Lever Press, a new, peer-reviewed, open-access, and digitally native scholarly press. Funded by a consortium of liberal arts college libraries, and guided by a partnership of the Amherst College Press and Michigan Publishing at the University of Michigan, Lever Press will offer within the world of scholarly publishing a perspective aligned with the unique mission and ethos of the nation’s residential liberal arts colleges.