The University of Liège has an exemplary Open Access mandate. It inspired a unique collaboration among researchers, university management and library. In this guest post, François Renaville, systems librarian at the ULg Library, explains how. ULg’s institutional repository ORBi is indexed in Primo Central. For more information about institutional repositories in Primo Central click here.
Open access to academic output has been for some years now in the center of scholarly communication at the University of Liège (ULg). In 2007, our Administrative Board adopted the Immediate-Deposit & Optional-Access (IDOA) mandate and took the radical step of making it compulsory for our researchers to add references for all their publications and academic conferences to the institutional repository, backdated to 2002, and to deposit the full electronic version of all the articles that they have published since 2002.
A reference to a scholarly publication has to be placed in the repository as soon as the publication has been accepted by the publisher or as soon as the document is considered to be complete. The obligation to deposit the full text of documents in the repository is relevant only for articles published in journals, but it is in no way exclusive: any other type of publication (book chapters, dissertations, reports, conference presentations, lectures for the general public, posters, course notes…) can be deposited as well. Authors grant open access to the full text of the documents if the publishers’ terms allow them to do so. In cases where embargoes or other restrictions are imposed by a publisher, readers can still request as a print copy from the author directly from the repository.
author: Christine Stohn
source: Ex Libris Initiatives Blog (8/5/13)
