ACRL Policy Statement on Open Access to Scholarship by Academic Librarians

Originally approved by the ACRL Board of Directors during the ALA Annual Conference, June 2016. Revision approved by the ACRL Board of Directors, April 2019.

Scholarship by academic librarians advances the fields of library and information sciences, influences the practices of professions aligned with those fields, and informs effective advocacy. In support of transparency and increased access to library and information sciences scholarship globally, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) recommends as standard practice that academic librarians publish in open access venues, deposit in open repositories, and make openly accessible all products across the lifecycle of their scholarly and research activity, including articles, research data, monographs, presentations, digital scholarship, grant documentation, and grey literature. Authors should retain rights to these products of scholarship and make them available for reuse under an appropriate license.

When depositing any of these scholarly products in a repository, authors are responsible for following best practices for protecting sensitive data, determining at what date the deposited products become openly accessible, and taking into account applicable institutional or funder policies and other relevant considerations. Authors should follow accepted citation principles for attribution, unique identification, and persistence for all open scholarly products. [See Data Citation Synthesis Group: Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles. Martone M. (ed.) San Diego CA: FORCE11; 2014 https://doi.org/10.25490/a97f-egyk.] 

ACRL further recommends as standard practice that publishers of library and information sciences scholarship explore and implement open practices throughout the editorial process and adopt models to make publications, data, and associated scholarly products openly accessible without embargo. Librarians who are editors, reviewers, authors, grantees, or digital scholars should advocate open models of creation and dissemination with publishers, funding agencies, and project or program managers.