Below is the language we are proposing be added to the faculty handbook. We will be discussing this at the upcoming March faculty meeting, as well as at open meetings that we will hold in March and April.

Open Access Policy

The faculty members of Middlebury College are committed to broad dissemination of their research and scholarship. Therefore, faculty members grant Middlebury College permission to exercise the copyright in their scholarly articles in order to make those articles freely available. More specifically, each faculty member grants to Middlebury College a nonexclusive, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of their scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. Middlebury will grant these rights in turn to the authors themselves, so faculty authors may exercise the same rights. This applies to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored by Middlebury faculty. It does not apply to articles completed before the adoption of this policy, or to articles already under an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement at the time this policy was adopted. The granting of this license will have no effect on the copyright ownership of the faculty articles, which remains with the faculty member unless they assign them to another party. This license is revocable at will for individual articles using the process described below.

If directed by a faculty member, the Dean of the Faculty’s Office will automatically waive application of the license for a particular article or delay access for a specified period of time. Faculty members may request waivers at any time. A decision to obtain a waiver  will have no bearing in annual or other reviews of faculty.

Faculty will provide the author’s final version of each article to the Dean of the Faculty’s Office.  Unless the faculty member has obtained a waiver, the Dean of the Faculty’s Office will make the article available to the public in an open-access repository. Otherwise, the article will be stored in the repository for archival purposes.