As the open access movement continues to pick up momentum, the University of North Carolina Faculty Council will consider making scholarly articles available to the public at no charge.
A task force came up with a new policy designed to open up access to research articles through the Carolina Digital Repository, reported the Daily Tar Heel. In this system, the writer could grant both the university and a research journal copyright to use the article instead of giving exclusive copyright to the journal.
The problem with the current scholarly publishing system is that research articles are locked away in journals that charge large subscription fees. And because of that, many people can't read the articles.
The Faculty Council is expected to vote on the open access policy in April.