蘑菇传媒

Approved by The Ames Library faculty (11/5/21) and Library Advisory Committee (11/12/21)

鈥淥pen-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.鈥� ()

鈥淥pen Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium 鈥� digital or otherwise 鈥� that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.鈥� ()

The Ames Library supports open access (OA) scholarly publishing and open educational resources by

• Providing an institutional repository, , where faculty and student scholarship is openly accessible and readily discoverable.
• Supporting faculty who wish to create and/or share open content with funding, technical support using the  platform.
• Creating digital collections that enhance access to our special collections and archives as well as .
• Contributing metadata or items to open access digital collections such as the and the .
• Subscribing to publications of not-for-profit publishers when those publishers are trying to move toward OA publishing. 
• Supporting staff who acquire, catalog, and process open materials to improve discovery of open content.
• Collaborating with to ensure that our library systems provide robust discovery of open content as well as paid content.
• Monitoring regional, national, and international trends and developments in and , sharing our knowledge and expertise with the campus community for purposes of scholarship and pedagogy.
• Integrating open resources and tools into instruction sessions for students to build their awareness of the economics of content creation, access, and licensing.
• Contributing collections funds in support of select OA initiatives.
• Examples of initiatives for consideration include: , , , ,  , , the , , and .
• Continuing memberships in advocacy organizations such as the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (), the Library Publishing Coalition (), the through CARLI.
• Participating in research or professional activities that support open, such as the and .

Criteria against which open initiatives are assessed for support: 

• Type of funding (institutional support, grant funding, article processing charges, other)
• Business plan for long-term sustainability
• Relevance of content to the liberal arts curriculum
• Cost of participation
• Availability of usage statistics
• Ability to participate in governance
• Integration of workflows with distribution outlets
• Inclusion of metadata in discovery systems
• Archiving practices that include preservation strategies
• User interface
• Local and global benefits