Officials published a new University policy Tuesday that gives GW Libraries permission to post faculty, librarian and postdoctoral student research online for free, as part of a longstanding effort to widen public access to GW scholarship.
Under the University’s new open access policy, each faculty member, librarian and postdoctoral student — defined in the policy as an “author” — grants GW a nonexclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide license to archive and make their scholarly articles publicly available for no charge. The adoption of the policy comes more than 11 years after the Faculty Senate narrowly passed a resolution in 2015 urging GW to adopt an open access policy to make accessing high-quality research more affordable.
GW Libraries will notify authors when it identifies eligible articles and will request a final or near-final electronic copy to post in a permanent institutional repository, GW ScholarSpace, according to the policy.
The policy applies to scholarly articles written while an author is employed by GW and does not cover articles published or bound by “incompatible” licensing or assignment agreements made before the policy’s adoption. The policy also includes an opt-out via a waiver request form for authors who do not want their work posted on ScholarSpace.
Holly Dugan, co-chair of the Faculty Senate Libraries Committee and an associate professor of English, said in an email that she was very excited to see the resolution become GW policy, calling it “long overdue.”
She said the policy was the result of hard work, especially from Libraries and Academic Innovation’s scholarly communication team.
“It will help to ensure faculty research is accessible to a wider audience,” Dugan said.
Members of the libraries committee have voiced frustration with the time it took for the 2015 Faculty Senate resolution to become policy, according to the committee’s 2024-25 annual report. The policy’s enactment was further delayed by the University’s implementation of the policy review process last academic year, according to the report.
The new policy assigns GW Libraries responsibility for implementing the policy and maintaining procedures in consultation with the Faculty Senate’s Libraries Committee. It lists the responsible officials as the dean of libraries and academic innovation and the directors of the Jacob Burns Law Library and the Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library.
Many universities have adopted open access policies, like Duke, Columbia, Harvard and Princeton universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Studies have found that open access leads to more citations and greater visibility for research, according to the policy’s frequently asked questions page.
The Faculty Senate voted 12 to 11 in 2015 for the University to adopt an open access policy and came after debate by senators about how open access could benefit faculty and students while still allowing researchers to publish in high-profile journals with restrictive copyright rules.
Some faculty worried at the time that an open access policy could complicate publication in journals that retain copyright and do not allow immediate free distribution, which the waiver under the new policy allows exceptions for.
Dean of Libraries and Academic Innovation, Geneva Henry, has promoted open access policies over the past decade as a way the University can combat rising journal costs and promote its research to new audiences. Henry said in 2019 subscription rates for journals often increase by 7 to 8 percent each year while the library’s budget remains about the same, forcing the libraries to cut subscriptions annually.
“It’s at a point now where more people aware of it and must have a realization of how unsustainable it is to keep up this model of having to subscribe to very expensive journals,” Henry said at the time.
Katherine Puskarz, a staff councilmember who sits on the Faculty Senate library committee, said last November that library officials planned to cut low-usage journal subscriptions rather than staff, due to the University-wide budget cuts.
The University is also considering implementing a flat-fee textbook program called Follett ACCESS to help make buying textbooks more affordable, though some faculty expressed concern that using Follett would undercut the library’s efforts — like its Top Textbooks program — to address the high cost of course materials.
