University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
AC-11: Open Access to Research

The University Digital Conservancy is an institutional repository that provides open access and long-term preservation to work created at the U of M.

As a publicly funded land-grant institution, the University of Minnesota is committed to ensuring the greatest possible scholarly and public access to the research and scholarship produced by the University community. In addition to securing the public benefit of such access, this policy is intended to serve faculty interests by promoting greater reach and impact for articles, simplifying authors' retention of distribution rights, and aiding preservation.

Each faculty member grants to the University of Minnesota a shared, limited, right to make available his or her scholarly articles and to reproduce, display, and distribute those articles for the purpose of open access. More specifically, each faculty member grants to the University of Minnesota a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide license to exercise such rights under copyright as are necessary to achieve the goals of open access, dissemination, and preservation, provided that the articles are not sold for profit, and to authorize others to do the same.

The author retains copyright ownership unless that author chooses to transfer rights to other parties, such as a publisher. The University retains only the limited rights outlined above.

The policy applies to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty as defined in Board of Regents Policy: Copyright, except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the author entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy.

The Provost or Provost's designate 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. Grant of such a waiver is mandatory, not at the discretion of any person or group. Waiver requests must be made in writing, or via a system (such as an online form) that may be made available for this specific purpose.

The Office of the Provost will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving any dispute concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the faculty.
https://policy.umn.edu/research/scholarlyarticles

Our Publishing Services align with the University’s land-grant mission of "promoting access to higher education and collaborating to advance knowledge benefiting communities, the state, and world." The core principles of the Libraries’ Publishing Services are:

We believe the Libraries serves as a critical, central resource for publishing expertise on campus and our essential services should be offered without charge.
We support scholars by contributing quality, scholarly works to the public commons through open access publishing.
We practice transparent production processes in order to promote critical understanding of the publishing landscape’s range of production and economic models.
We support intellectual freedom by keeping the means of production in the hands of scholars.
We seek to create partnerships on campus and beyond, to help shape the future of scholarly publishing.
We support innovative publications and scholarly experimentation grounded in widely-used standards and time-proven practices.
We believe that the scholarly ecosystem works best when creators retain their copyright.
We leverage replicable and scalable tools and services to support the economic sustainability of common publishing activities on campus.
We work to decrease the cost of higher education for students through the production and integration of open content into course curriculum.
We provide leadership to the broader library publishing professional community on developing new models of scholarly publishing.