Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health adopts open access

The Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University is the first school at the university and one of the first US schools of public health to adopt an open access resolution. The school's new resolution calls for faculty and other researchers at the school to post their papers in openly available online repositories such as Columbia’s Academic Commons.  

In accordance with its open-access resolution, Mailman School researchers commit to having their published scholarly articles included in Columbia's digital repository, Academic Commons, where content is freely available to the public – or in another repository such as the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed Central, which makes the research publicly available.

'A wider dissemination of research and information has been a number one priority of our faculty, who are motivated by the belief that scientific knowledge belongs to everyone,' said Dean Linda P. Fried, DeLamar Professor of Public Health. 'It is in the interest of all of us to take every measure possible to improve and simplify the process of gaining access to our research findings. I couldn’t be more proud of our faculty who initiated this resolution to share their scholarly work.'

The resolution covers all scholarly journal articles as of 1 May. There is an opt-out feature built into the resolution, permitting the researcher to request that an article that appears in a journal that insists on exclusivity not have that piece included in the repository.