COAR has formed a Task Force for “Open Access Agreements and Licenses”

Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) http://www.coar-repositories.org/ has formed a Task Force for “Open Access Agreements and Licenses” with members representing both the repository community as well as the licensing community (see below for a current list of members).

The purpose of the Task Force is to improve access to research papers globally, and the desired outcomes are:

•  Review existing agreements and licenses
•   Assessment of efficacy and value of various licenses and agreements
•   Recommendations and best practices for creating and adopting OA
agreements and licenses
•   Communication plan for distributing and promoting recommendations

They are now collecting different versions of open access clauses (e.g. author rights, self-archiving, parallel publication, compensation for Open Access material etc.) from your existing licenses, and also samples of agreements with gold open access publishers. Please send your replies to anna.lunden@kb.se.

They aim to have our preliminary results available in time for the ICOLC conference in Vienna in October, and look forward to having an opportunity to discuss them then!

Open Access Agreements and Licenses Task Force

Chair: Kathleen Shearer, Canadian Association of Research Libraries
Lars Bjornshauge, SPARC Europe
Saskia Franken, Utrecht University Library
Kristine Hillenkötter, Göttingen State and University Library
Neil Jacobs, Joint Information Systems Committee
Anna Lunden, BIBSAM Consortium National Library of Sweden
Hildegaard Schaffler, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich
Ralf Schimmer, Max Planck Digital Library
Birgit Schmidt, Confederation of Open Access Repositories, OpenAire
Yan Zhao, National Science Library, China