Many thanks to Lana Wood and Daisy Muralles from Cal State East Bay for allowing us to reuse of their OA Policy content.
1. Increases Visibility and Impact of Research
An OA policy ensures that Cal State LA faculty can self archive their scholarly articles and making them freely available to the public. This increases readership, citation rates, and overall impact—particularly valuable for a public institution committed to serving a diverse and often underrepresented community.
2. Promotes Equity in Knowledge Access
Not everyone has access to expensive journal subscriptions. OA removes those barriers, making knowledge accessible to students, researchers, and the general public—both locally and globally. This aligns with Cal State LA’s mission of inclusive excellence and community empowerment.
3. Supports Student Success and Faculty Advancement
Self-archiving in an institutional repository makes it easier for students to access quality research materials without cost, enriching their learning. Faculty benefit by gaining broader exposure, which can enhance reputations, lead to more collaborations and support tenure and promotion cases.
4. Aligns with CSU System and National Trends
Many institutions, including others in the CSU system and the UC system, have already adopted OA policies. This is becoming standard practice in higher education, and Cal State LA adopting such a policy keeps it in step with current academic values.
5. Reinforces Public Investment in Research
Much of the research at Cal State LA is supported by public funds. Making that research openly available is a way to give back to the taxpayers and demonstrate transparency and accountability in public scholarship.
6. Enhances Institutional Reputation
OA policies reflect a university’s commitment to innovation, transparency, and public service. It can improve Cal State LA’s standing among peers, funders, and prospective students.
Acknowledgment: Scholarly Communication: MIT Libraries https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-access-policy/
1. Does Cal State LA currently have an Open Access Policy? Not yet. The University is exploring the possibility of implementing an Open Access Policy on campus, but there is no formal campus-wide OA policy at the moment.
2. What is an Open Access Policy? An open access policy is repository-based open access. OA models are agnostic about publisher open-access behaviors, relying instead on institutions and authors to take steps to make otherwise toll-access works freely available in online repositories that may be (and often are) managed by institutions. An Open Access policy focuses exclusively on ensuring that authors retain the right to deposit their articles in an open-access repository and share them freely.
3. What are the advantages of the Open Access Policy? The intention of this policy is to promote the broadest possible access to Cal State LA’s research. In doing so, it also protects faculty member’s intellectual property by retaining copyright to their scholarly articles. Retaining copyright to scholarly articles keeps authors in the driver’s seat over their work by enabling future uses such as posting their work to personal websites or places like ResearchGate, using it in classrooms, or expanding upon it for future work.
4. Have other academic institutions adopted open-access policies? Here is a link to the MIT Libraries
page, which provides a list of U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities that have adopted open-access
policies. https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-open-access/oa-policies-at-other-universities/
5. Does it mean faculty can only publish in Open Access Journals? No. The policy applies to journal publications but does not in any way dictate which journals Cal State LA faculty must publish. While faculty can choose to publish in truly Open Access journals that are rigorously peer-reviewed, an Open Access policy is solely about retaining authors’ rights to deposit their articles in an Open Access repository and share them however they see fit.
6. Who's covered by the policy? Cal State LA’s open access policy will cover all Cal State LA faculty who author scholarly articles while employed by Cal State LA. Monographs are not included within this policy.
7. Are universities trying to claim ownership of faculty members' intellectual property or copyright
through this policy? This policy is not an attempt by universities to take away faculty’s intellectual property or copyright. In fact, this policy is designed to protect faculty authors and their scholarly work. Open Access policies are typically initiated and passed by faculty members themselves to safeguard their rights in an academic publishing landscape where publishers often claim exclusive copyright over journal articles as a condition of publication. By adopting such a policy, faculty preemptively grant a non-exclusive license to the university, which serves as a protective measure against publishers. The university then immediately and automatically transfers that license back to the faculty authors. This process does not involve a transfer of copyright but instead ensures that faculty retain or regain key rights to their work—rights they might otherwise lose through standard or even progressive publishing contracts. As a result, faculty authors gain significantly greater control over how they use and share their own research.
8. Is it mandatory for faculty to self-archive their articles to ScholarWorks? Cal State LA faculty
are encouraged to self-archive their articles to ScholarWorks.
9. Does this policy threaten academic freedom? No, the policy does not threaten your academic freedom—it actually helps safeguard your rights as a scholar. It does not interfere with your choice of research topics, methods, areas of study, or your decision on where to publish. Instead, it supports you in retaining rights to your intellectual property when you publish, rather than transferring all of those rights to a publisher.
10. Would it restrict the ability of faculty to publish in peer-reviewed scholarly journals with high impact factors? No. Faculty publish where they would have published without such a policy. If necessary or desired, a faculty member can opt out of the policy for any scholarly article, no questions asked. Faculty can also delay access to their scholarly articles with an embargo at a time period they set.
11. Do I need to deposit only scholarly articles to ScholarWorks? Yes, this Open Access Policy is
referring to journal articles at this time.
12. Which version of my scholarly article should I deposit? Authors should deposit the "Author’s Accepted Manuscript" of each article. This is the version that has undergone peer review, been accepted for publication, and typically represents the author's final draft before the publisher applies formatting and copyediting. Publishers generally retain rights to the "version of record," which is the finalized, copyedited, and formatted version that appears in the journal and on its online platform. The Open Policy Finder page (Formerly Sherpa Services) provides information to authors and institutions about a specific journal's self-archiving policy. https://openpolicyfinder.jisc.ac.uk/
13. Would an Open Access policy restrict the ability of faculty to earn publishing royalties? Open Access policy provisions pertain only to scholarly articles, which almost never pay author royalties. Royalty-producing publications, such as monographs, do not fall under the category of "scholarly articles".
14. Is an Open Access policy legal? According to Katie Fortney, JD, Copyright Policy & Education Officer at the UC’s California Digital Library, “the legal soundness of this practice is noncontroversial and the risk to universities adopting such policies is extremely small.” None of the institutions with Open Access policies have reported legal problems as a result of their policies. Additionally, two legal studies have analyzed the Open Access policy’s rights-retention approach, and both concluded that it is legally sound.
https://libguides.calstatela.edu/ld.php?content_id=80311839
15. What does it mean to grant a non-exclusive license to the University?
The grant of rights to the university in an OA policy is a license, not a copyright transfer. Granting a
university a non-exclusive license means you’re giving the university permission to use
your work (e.g., thesis, dissertation, research paper, invention, etc.)—but you still own the rights, and
you're free to give the same permission to others or use the work however you like. This has never
created barrier to publication for authors. Here's a blog post from 2012 summarizing a law review article talking about the policy's legal mechanism: https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/09/17/is-the-harvard-open-access-policy-legally-sound/
16. What if my article is already openly accessible? No further action is required if your article is already openly available. However, you are still welcome to add the article to ScholarWorks for archival purposes, even if it is already openly available.
Acknowledgment: Cal State LA East Bay Library