Prepare Work for Open Access

The Open Access Policy requires faculty to submit publications to Middlebury’s Open Access Scholarship (OAS) repository. Staff and students are not included under the policy and therefore are only encouraged to participate in the OAS.

Obtain Permission

When a work is published, the  rights to the copying and distribution of the work sometimes are assigned solely to the publisher. Review your rights as an author and make sure you understand the implications of your publishing contracts. Use the Author’s Rights page for an overview of publishing and distribution, how to retain your rights, and suggested practices when working with publishers. 

If a publisher prohibits free access to your published materials, you can still submit a copy to OAS that will not be publicly shared.

Author’s Addendum

Use an author’s addendum to guarantee the right to deposit your work into the OAS repository. Adapt Middlebury’s template, or create your own in consultation with your publisher.

Middlebury Addendum Template

Select your preferred format and reuse or revise our author’s addendum templates.

Check the Policy

Find out if your publisher requires a waiver, by searching for the journal title or publisher name in the Sherpa Romeo database. Then confirm with your publisher that you may deposit your work into the OAS repository. 

Once you have come to an agreement with your publisher, you are ready to submit your work to Open Access Scholarship.

Types of Materials

Open Access Scholarship accepts any digital or digitized scholarly output created by Middlebury faculty and staff. The OA policy applies to scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. It does not cover creative works, books, commissioned articles, or other publications where authors are compensated directly for their writing.

Versions

The Open Access Policy reserves the College the right to host the author approved manuscript, which is the copy that has been accepted by editorial review but not yet copy edited and typeset by the publisher. However, the published version should also be deposited if the author has the right to do so or has permission from the publisher.

Embargoes

An embargo is a period of time following publication in which a work is made available exclusively to paying customers. This can be negotiated with the publisher, although many do not require any embargo periods. Unless specified, any work deposited will default for no embargo period.

Waivers

Faculty embrace the spirit and intent of Open Access by making accessibility and democratized scholarship the default. Enforcement is not a goal of the policy; the policy explicitly states that obtaining waivers or failing to submit an article will have no effect on  reviews or salary increases.

Even if a waiver is obtained, Middlebury encourages faculty to submit their articles to the OAS repository. If you’ve obtained a waiver, your submitted article will not be accessible to the public. However, metadata related to articles in the repository may still be shared with, and indexed by, outside tools such as Google Scholar, providing increased visibility to your work. It can also serve as an archive for your articles.

The Dean of the Faculty’s Office will automatically waive application of Middlebury’s license for particular articles or delay access for a specified period of time at a faculty member’s request. Faculty members may obtain waivers at any time.

Review the language of the waiver in advance of obtaining a waiver.