Overall Rating Gold
Overall Score 67.80
Liaison Jim Walker
Submission Date Nov. 4, 2024

STARS v2.2

University of Texas at Austin
AC-11: Open Access to Research

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 2.00 / 2.00 Rocky Baier
Data Analyst and Reporting Coordinator
Office of Sustainability
"---" indicates that no data was submitted for this field

Open access repository

Does the institution offer repository hosting that makes versions of journal articles, book chapters, and other peer-reviewed scholarly works by its employees freely available on the public internet?:
Yes

Website URL where the open access repository is available:
https://data.tdl.org/

A brief description of the open access repository:

The Texas Data Repository is a platform for publishing and archiving small datasets (and other data products) created by faculty, staff, and students at Texas higher education institutions.

The Lens is not comprehensive, but it is very broad and does let you search by university affiliation.


Open access policy

Does the institution have a published policy that requires its employees to publish scholarly works open access or archive final post-peer reviewed versions of scholarly works in an open access repository?:
No

A copy of the institution's open access policy:
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The institution's open access policy:

In response to relevant recommendations from the UT Austin Task Force on the Future of UT Libraries commissioned by the Provost’s Office in 2018, the Provost has launched this working group on Sustainable Open Scholarship to address these and other impacts on the effectiveness of open scholarship at UT Austin. 

Goals and Objectives: 

  •  To engage campus in the development and articulation of strategies for how the University of Texas Libraries can transform access to information resources in support of the educational and research missions of The University of Texas at Austin. 

  • Develop an open access policy that reflects the university’s commitment to advance open sustainable scholarship practices for review and approval by the Faculty Council; 

  • Engage researchers to develop campus-wide strategies to support access, use, and curation of primary research data based on FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable); 

  • Articulate strategies that accelerate efforts to promote open resources, technology and teaching practices in education. 

  • Explore existing frameworks/models/MoUs of negotiations with publishers to support or develop a set of guiding principles for negotiating UT’s contracts that support open-access practices with scholarly publishers. 

  

Open Access Subcommittee: 

  • Members:  

    • Chairs:  

  • Co-chair: Francesco Maggi, Professor, Department of Mathematics, College of Natural Sciences 

    • Co-chair: Somshuvra Mukhopadhyay, Associate Professor, College of Pharmacy 

  • Invited Members: 

    • Miroslava Benes, Associate Professor, School of Architecture 

    • Abraham Wickelgren, Professor, School of Law 

    • Marvin Hackert, Associate Dean and Professor, Graduate School / Department of Molecular Biosciences, College of Natural Sciences 

    • Tracy Villareal, Professor, Department of Marine Science, College of Natural Sciences 

    • Dawn Durante, Editor in Chief, University of Texas Press 

    • Jim Kuhn, Associate Director for Library Division, Harry Ransom Center 

    • Margaret Schlankey, Head of Reference Services, Briscoe Center for American History 

    • John Hatfield, Professor, Department of Finance, McCombs School of Business 

    • Ashwin Desai, undergraduate student, McCombs School of Business (Finance) 

    • Colleen Lyon, Head of Scholarly Communications, UT Libraries 

  • Charge: 

    • Engage campus constituencies to facilitate a deeper understanding of the unsustainability of the current system and the benefit of immediate access to scholarship to advance UT’s research and discoveries that will change the world. 

  • Outcome:  

    • Develop a statement of values around open access that reflects UT’s commitment to advance sustainable open scholarship practices. 

https://provost.utexas.edu/initiatives/sustainable-open-scholarship-working-group/  


Does the policy cover the entire institution? :
No

APC fund

Does the institution provide an open access article processing charge (APC) fund for employees?:
Yes

A brief description of the open access APC fund:

The UT Libraries participates in several open access publishing initiatives. More information regarding these initiatives, including funding priorities, is at https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/oa/utsupport  

  

Some of the initiatives funded include direct benefits to authors: 

  • Cambridge University Press: We have an agreement with Cambridge that allows all university authors to publish open access journal articles with no charge to the author. 

  • Luminos: 15% discount on the title publication fee. 

  • MDPI: 10% discount on APC. 

  • PeerJ: We’ve deposited money into an account with PeerJ. University authors can use those limited funds to pay their PeerJ APCs. 

  • PLOS Biology & PLOS Medicine: we are participating in the PLOS CAP program which means UT Austin corresponding authors won’t have to pay APCs for these two journals 

  • Portland Press: authors receive a discount on APC. 

  • Qualitative Data Repository (QDR): Our membership covers most curation deposit costs for university researchers. 

  

Other open access memberships provide university support for more sustainable publishing models: 

  • Ars Inveniendi Analytica 

  • arXiv 

  • Berghahn Open Anthro 

  • BioOne Complete 

  • Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO) 

  • DataCite 

  • Demography 

  • Directory of Open Access Journals 

  • EngrXiv 

  • Environmental Humanities 

  • HathiTrust 

  • MIT Direct to Open 

  • Open Book Publishers 

  • Open Library of the Humanities 

  • ORCID 

  • PhilPapers 

  • Punctum Books 

  • Reveal Digital - Diversity & Dissent 

  • SciPost 

  • SCOAP3 

  • South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) 

  • Technical Reports Archive & Image Library (TRAIL) 


Open access journal hosting

Does the institution provide open access journal hosting services through which peer-reviewed open access journals are hosted on local servers with dedicated staff who provide publishing support at no (or minimal) cost?:
Yes

A brief description of the open access journal hosting services:

UT Libraries support digital scholarship in many ways with dedicated staff and subject liaisons who are experts on methods of research and publication in their areas. This includes journal publication support through Open Journal Systems. And, we provide infrastructure support for dissemination and preservation through our online archive, Texas ScholarWorks. 

https://www.lib.utexas.edu/research-help-support/scholarly-communication    

Texas Digital Library is a membership organization with member libraries from across the state. It is housed at UT Austin Libraries physically and administratively. There are a number of OA journals hosted through TDL that come from UT-Austin. 

https://www.tdl.org/journals/  


Optional Fields 

Estimated percentage of peer-reviewed scholarly works published annually by the institution’s employees that are deposited in a designated open access repository:
41.39

Website URL where information about the institution’s support for open access is available:
https://www.lib.utexas.edu/research-help-support

Additional documentation to support the submission:
AC11_Open_Access_to_Research_OA_Repository_Percentages.xlsx

Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
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The information presented here is self-reported. While AASHE staff review portions of all STARS reports and institutions are welcome to seek additional forms of review, the data in STARS reports are not verified by AASHE. If you believe any of this information is erroneous or inconsistent with credit criteria, please review the process for inquiring about the information reported by an institution or simply email your inquiry to stars@aashe.org.