Subject: US090-3
To: Gordon Sayre
From: Peter Gilkey
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2009 08:05:29

Dear Gordon

This is to respond to your telephone message yesterday - I am copying Dev on this email as I talked with him briefly yesterday about this as well.

Things are in a very preliminary stage. I will be introducing legislation in the Senate at the 11 November meeting http://www.uoregon.edu/~uosenate/dirsen090/US090-3.html to create a Senate Ad Hoc Committee on "public access to scholarly materials" to use a very short phrase that very inadequately describes a very complex subject. So I should be most grateful if you could look at the legislation in question and give me any feed back on it as quickly as possible. The purpose of the committee is to get in and get out quickly and draft a policy statement as expeditiously as possible along the lines of the Harvard or MIT or some other suitable model. There has been an enormous amount of good work on the subject and I don't think it is necessary to reinvent the wheel. And this is only one of a whole constellation of related problems -- open access textbooks being just one that Dev is working on. I, Barbara Altmann, Deb Carver, and the Provost are meeting this Friday to discuss the matter and I will have a much better idea of what is entailed after that meeting. So my thoughts outlined above must be regarded as purely tentative and subject to change - I claim no monopoly of wisdom.

If and when the Senate passes this legislation, I will be consulting widely about membership in the committee -- my current thinking is that I want to keep it fairly small and keeps it focus on drafting a policy statement to bring to the Senate. So, as I say, I will be consulting widely to get names. I will then forward those names to the Senate Nominating Committee and ask them to put together the committee for me. And then I will proceed. I am trying to be very democratic and transparent this year.

Bottom line. Take a look at the motion and let me know what you think. I am especially interested in additional references. Keep in touch.

PBG