At the October 19 meeting of the Faculty Council, the Library Policy Committee (LPC) presented a proposal for a University open access policy that would enable immediate, unfettered access to Emory faculty authored scholarly articles. In April 2009, the Council approved a resolution to have the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence facilitate a series of conversations across campus exploring the possibility of an open access repository for articles by Emory faculty. The result of those discussions was the proposal endorsed by the LPC. Key points from the proposal:

• authors will retain sufficient copyrights to their own work
• an opt-out clause will be provided
• the open access digital repository must be easy to use for authors and readers
• the open access policy will be subject to periodic review and critique

For the next month, the LPC and Council encourage open conversation about the proposed policy; comments and questions are welcome at http://guides.main. library.emory.edu/OA. If faculty conversation indicates that the timing is appropriate, the Faculty Council will vote on a resolution to support the policy at its November meeting.