Towards effective institutional policies to promote open access in educational resources

Abstract

Nowadays Universities have different technological tools and LMS platforms to support on line teaching, which are known as Virtual Campus. In these digital environments teachers upload and share educational contents related to their own teaching and researching whose main target groups are the students. Virtual Campus area becoming institutional repositories of educational content delimited to the University environment and managed by their on line teaching and ICT services. At the same time, Universities are legally obliged to have institutional open access repositories with all their digital content, which are commonly managed by the library and archive services. Our main challenge in this context is to guarantee the intellectual property rights and the law on open access to public-funded science. That leads to launch and implement a knowledge management policy and to design and develop the technical tools to tackle with this new policy. What we present here is an overview of the existing and related initiatives in the framework of the national and international law and some proposals of the University of La Laguna to promote good practices to open access knowledge. First of all we have identified and catalogued all our digital resources, we have designed legal and technical training actions for researches, teachers and administrative staff and we have designed an institutional repository for teaching content, well catalogued and ready to be shared with other University repositories. Secondly, we have planned a technical procedure to guarantee the personal identification of authors and the date in which materials and contents are uploaded in virtual campus, compatible with the role of private publishers; we are designing the university open access policy and we are trying to know and control the scientific exchange in social networks in the framework of the university policy and the Spanish law.