IUPUI University Library supports and promotes the concept of open culture. This includes research, digital collections and data, publications, scholarly products, and technological resources. In doing so, we seek to create, curate, and share, whenever possible, work that is barrier-free and immediately available to anyone with access to the internet. In addition, we advocate that producers of such work allow the re-use and re-design of their work by the public through open licensing.
This commitment to openness is a tangible reflection of our belief that access to and creation of resources should be available to all regardless of education level, geographic location, organizational affiliation, socioeconomic status, and traditionally disadvantaged groups in alignment with the UL Diversity Statement. Accordingly, we support our community in the creation of open resources and facilitate equitable access to those resources.
We also acknowledge that open knowledge is in the economic interest of the Library and our campus. It allows us to invest our resources in our institution and its unique content and research strengths, thus enhancing the well-being of the institution and the state of Indiana.
We aim to create a culture of openness on our campus. To that end, we support our community in contributing to the open knowledge landscape through promoting open access publishing, open content, open data, and open educational resources. We educate our community about the value of openness in the free exchange of information and how to find and use open resources.
To demonstrate our values, we commit to:
- making research available to the broader community through open access publishing and the library’s institutional repository.
- disseminating and increasing the visibility of IUPUI research and central Indiana history through a variety of channels, such as IUPUI ScholarWorks and cultural heritage collections.
- creating opportunities for innovative learning and scholarship through sharing and reuse of open resources.
- supporting and participating in collaborative open initiatives within our institution and with other research, higher education, and community-based organizations, including institutional memberships in open projects and organizations.
- choosing open source software, tools, and resources for library projects when at all possible.
- making tools, software, and intellectual output created by our staff open using appropriate open licensing, when possible.
- partnering with other institutions that support open to raise our collective bargaining power with vendors.
- joining national advocacy for openness and supporting public policy that furthers the open exchange of information.
In keeping with our commitment to openness, University Library will be transparent in its work by publishing our Open Values Statement, the Scholarly Communication Advisory Group’s evaluation criteria and related documents, a list of memberships, and information about open initiatives/projects undertaken.
Approved by the Scholarly Communication Advisory Group, June 26, 2019
Background
IUPUI University Library has a strong tradition in support of open access initiatives. Our institution adopted DSpace, an open source software used for institutional repositories (IR), in 2004. This was followed by the implementation of Open Journal System (OJS), a PKP product for open access publishing. In addition, the IUPUI library faculty adopted an Open Access Policy in 2009 that requires library faculty members to deposit published articles in the library’s institutional repository in an effort to share scholarship produced by the faculty more openly. Five years later, the IUPUI Faculty Council adopted an Open Access Policy for the Campus. Further, the IUPUI Open Access Publishing Fund was created in 2013 to assist faculty members with the costs of submitting articles to peer-reviewed journals requiring a fee. In alignment with ongoing efforts to support open scholarship, the library has been involved with open knowledge projects that are part of the Wikimedia ecosystem since 2017.