Approval of Previous Minutes —

Minutes from the December 2nd meeting: approved.

Unfinished Business —

Interim Co-Deans presented updates from the KU Libraries: new hires were selected, new searches are in progress, the challenge of retaining staff and replacement, announcement about the KU common book for AY 2023-2024.

New Business —

Agreements with Elsevier and Cambridge

The committee praised the transformative agreements with Elsevier and Cambridge University Press. They provide more access to journals for students, staff, and faculty and more opportunities for KU scholars to publish open access with reduced fees (or waived fees in some cases). The negotiated price increase for these agreements was within the budgetary constraints. The committee thanked all those who worked on the agreements at the KU Libraries. It was suggested that KU scholars leverage the new opportunities to publish open access through these transformative agreements. For that, when submitting to the relevant journals within these agreements, it was suggested that KU scholars must use their KU email address for the process to work automatically and offer them a discounted processing fee or a fee waiver in some cases.

Open Access Three-Year Report

The committee was presented with a report that showed an increase in almost all metrics of open access scholarship by KU scholars. More KU scholars are using the digital repository of the University of Kansas- ScholarWorks https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/ as a platform to expand access to their research without barriers. The committee expressed interest in exploring additional ideas to expand the use of this platform by KU scholars across schools and fields of study.

Open Access Policy for University of Kansas Scholars

Due to a lack of time for discussion, the revision of the policy was postponed for the next meeting.