By signing the Berlin Declaration on Open Access, Grand Valley State University is now one of only 33 institutions, associations and foundations in North America that use the Internet to make global knowledge more accessible to the public.

The signing of the declaration on Nov. 9 allows GVSU, specifically the GVSU Libraries, to post works from faculty and students on their websites free of copyright charges while also making the works available to anyone outside of the GVSU community.

Before Open Access, any work published by a faculty member or student was done through a publishing company, and if GVSU wanted to post the work online the rights had to be purchased through the publishing company. If authors do not sign away their rights to a publishing company, the university can post works for free under Open Access.

“Research that is both peer-reviewed and openly accessible is possible,” said Lee Van Orsdel, dean of university libraries. “By signing the Berlin Declaration, Grand Valley joins a growing number of leading institutions who are committed to finding that better way.”

Among those “leading institutions” who have signed the declaration with GVSU are Duke University and Harvard University.

Lynell DeWind, director of planning and organizational recourses at GVSU, said the university prefers the model where they do not have to pay twice for a published work; once by providing funding to faculty or students conducting research and a second time when purchasing the works from a publishing company.

“You may be used to searching in our databases looking for research in your specific topic, when you leave Grand Valley you lose access to some of those recourses,” she said. “As more and more Open Access work goes up, once you leave Grand Valley you can still see the research. It gets past the exclusive rights ownership by publishers.”

Doug Way, head of collection and scholarly communications at GVSU said by signing the declaration it signifies that the university supports the movement and believes in the principles of Open Access.

“Making scholarly research available in Michigan, in the United State and around the world is a real symbolic action which hopefully we are able to back up with tangible actions,” he said. “A publisher could charge you $35 to $45 to for a single journal article, if that article is open than there is no charge for that journal or article.”

As it stands, the GVSU Libraries have developed several ways to support the details of Open Access. ScholarWorks@GVSU is a digital repository that collects scholarly, educational and creative works by GVSU faculty, staff and students.

The libraries have also created a grant that supports faculty and graduate students who publish in an established peer-reviewed journal that has an Open Access option.

“What we are trying to do is change the model of really increasing cost for scholarly publications, which is really outstripping the inflation and outstripping even the cost of tuition,” he said. “If we can change this model, (students) will have much more access to resources and we will be able to provide access to as much recourses that we can with the limited amount of money we are able to get from the university.”

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