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University of Mandalay

Open Access Policy

Approved by: / Senate / Date first published: / February-2016
Version No. / 1.0 / Date updated: / -
Owner / OA Working Group / Review Date: / February-2018

This document has been designed to be accessible for readers. However, should you require the document in an alternative format please contact Dr. Tin Naing Win

© 2016 University of Mandalay

Glossary

This glossary section refers to the definitions of the certain terms used in this policy. Unless clearly inconsistent with or otherwise indicated by the context, the definitions set out below shall apply:

Article(s) means all published and peer reviewed scholarly work

Author(s) means an Employee(s) and/or Student who is the Creator of an Original Scholarly Publication

Book Chapter(s) means separated chapter of published and peer reviewed scholarly journals, books, (Theses?, dissertations?)

Conference Proceeding(s) means scholarly research work that has submitted and published after the holding of a conference

Copyright Holder(s)means the author or publisher

Creative Commons means a non-profit organisation which is committed to facilitating the legal sharing of creative works though a range of licences which allow creators to stipulate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of other creators. Creative Commonslicences follow a "some rights reserved" model in contrast to traditional copyright, which follows an "all rights reserved" model. Creative Commons therefore provides a continuum of rights between "all rights reserved" on the one end of the continuum and "no rights reserved" (public domain) on the other end;

Depositor(s)means the accredited author of UM who deposits his/her published articles

Embargo Periodmeans the period during which a publication can be ‘closed’ while deposited in the repository (i.e. the publication is not openly available)

“Employee”means a person who has entered into an employment relationship with UM, whether academic or professional, administrative support or service staff, full-time or part-time, and whether full appointment or joint appointment, including honorary and affiliate appointments and assistantships;

Facultymeans all the academic staff of the university

Final Copiesmean scholarly works as submitted to an academic board, journal, magazine, or press

Information Servicesmean services supported by the repository manager and administrator for the depositors

Institutional Repositorymeans an officially designated repository for UM archiving purposes, details of which are published by UM Libraries;

Itemsmean all the scholarly works submitted to and deposited in the repository

Metadatameans structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource” (NISO, 2004). Examples of key metadata elements are: Title of the article/document; Author (Creator) of the document; Description of the content; Source of the document, Date created;

Monograph(s)means a scholarly article, paper, or book on a single topic

Peer-reviewed Journal(s)means scholarly journal reviewed by university academics and published by university or university related presses

Publication(s) means the peer-reviewed published (or under publication) work of researchers based in an institution of the university (indicatively this comprises articles, monographs, book chapters, reports, conference presentations)

Publicly Funded Researchmeans research funded by a public foundation

Published Book(s)means all books published by the university staff members

Report(s)means all graduate and undergraduate students’ academic report

Repositorymeans a storage container for content artefacts, physical or electronic

Repository Administratormeans someone who has responsibility to manage the affair of ICT of the repocitory

Repository Managermeans someone who has responsibility to manage the affairs of the repocitory

Research Datameans the data (such as statistics, results of experiments, measurements, observations, interview recording, images, etc.) used to validate the results presented in scientific publications

Research Student(s)means graduate students

Researcher(s) means someone who did a research and submitted it to the repository for archiving. In other words He/She is any member of the research staff of a department, of all levels and irrespective of their employment status

Review Committee(s) means an association which has responsibility to guide and inform the researchers, scholars, academic, students, etc about OA policy of UM and copyright related policies

Scholarly Publicationmeans an article or paper submitted for publication in a journal which may, or may not, be peer reviewed and may, or may not, be Open Access, or in conference

Staffmeans all academic and non-academic staff of the university

UM means University of Mandalay

Open Access Policy (Draft) as adopted by the Open Access Working Group, University of Mandalay, February 2016

University of Mandalay-Open Access Repository(UM-OAR)

Open Access Policy (Draft)

  1. Preamble

Central to the University of Mandalay’s underlying vision is “being the research-oriented leading university in the country to contribute to the benefit of global community forever standing as an International level university thatpursues lifelong learning and research”[1]. University of Mandalay[2]upholds research, teaching and learning skills of Academics and Research Students who would strive for building of modern developed democratic nation and for socio-economic welfare of the people of Myanmar.

Although the UM is currently not a signatory of The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to the Sciences and Humanitiesit has decided to lay down this open access policy and set up the University of Mandalay-Open Access Repository (UM-OAR) which is an officially designated digitalopen access repository based at the Central Library[3] of the University with anorganized set of services to collect, store, index, and provide access to scholarship produced by accredited academics and students of the University of Mandalay.Therefore, although this policy applies to all Faculty, Staff and Research Students of the University it does not apply to Scholarly Publications written either before an Author joined or after the Author left UM.

II.Benefits of Open Access

This open access policy will:

  • open up the outputs of the university to the world
  • maximise the visibility and impact of these outputs as a result
  • encourage faculty, researchers and students to use academic open sources in their teaching, learning and research activities
  • collectively keep and preserve scholarly publications and research data produced by the university’s faculty, researchers and students of all levels and make these published works and related sources accessible worldwide by everyone
  • uphold academic sustainability by expanding human resources
  • increase citations to and maximize the visibility of UM scholarship
  • stimulate new research opportunities and collaborations

III. Content Policy

As the ultimate aim of the UM-OAR is to stand as one of the most significant and largest open access repositories in upper Myanmar, it, with the coordination of the faculties of sciences and humanities, offers worldwide free and persistent point of access to a wide variety of scholarly works which include Published Books, Peer-reviewed Journals, Articles, Monographs, Conference Proceedings, Book Chapters, Publicly Funded Research, Reports and related Research Data as mandatory items.All journal articles, published from January 2007, are to be archived in the University's Digital Research Repository ( By the consent of the UM and bilateral agreement of supervisors and Ph D students Final Copies of Ph D theses can be deposited in the UM-OAR. Other scholarly works in connection with the Researcher’s academic or professional activities may be included at the discretion of him or her as optional pieces.Items are individually tagged with: their version type and date; their peer-review status; their publication status. The process of archiving will be supported by Information Services of the library of the UM.By this policy, the depositor is the copyright owner, or has the permission of author/copyright holder (if by proxy) to deposit; the author and any other rights holders must grant permission to the host institution i.e. (currently) the library to distribute copies of their work via the internet. The author has sought and gained permission to include any subsidiary material owned by third parties (if any). The author must agree to grant the repository the nonexclusive right to carry out the additional acts, e.g. capture, store, index, and provide free worldwide access to scholarship produced by the University of Mandalay. The copyright ownership of the authors/publishers is unaffected through submission of their work.

IV.Submission Policy ‐ concerning depositors, quality & copyright

1.Items may only be deposited by accredited researchers/PhD Students based at the University of Mandalay or their respective department’s head.

2.Authors may only submit their own work for archiving (including co‐authored papers).

3.UM Academic staff members and PhD students should submit an appropriate version of all their scholarly articles to the UM-OAR through the respective review committee of their departments. Then the submitted items will pass to OA Working Group which will decide which to be deposited or which to be embargoed.

4.The Review Committee of each department will provide guidance on the copyright policies of major academic journal and other publications.

5. Articles are to be submitted immediately upon acceptance for publication.

6.Submitted items are not vetted by the Repository Manager. If needed, the departments appoint their Review Committees that decide which content would represent the departments in the best way.

7. Items must be submitted in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (pdf), or, whereappropriate, an alternative format as agreed by the Repository Administrator.

8. The validity and authenticity of the content of submissions is the sole responsibility of theDepositor.

9. Items can be deposited at any time, but will not be made publicly visible until the item hasbeen published, and until any publishers' or funders' Embargo Period has expired.

10.All deposited items will contain any acknowledgements as specified by publisher policies;the Repository Administrator will ensure these are added as required.

11. Any copyright violations contained within items are entirely the responsibility of theauthors/depositors.

12. If University of Mandalay-Open Access Repository receives proof of copyright violation, therelevant item will be removed immediately.

V.Preservation Policy

  1. Items will be retained for an indefinite period.
  2. Repository will try to make sure continued readability and accessibility. But it may not be promising to guarantee the readability of some atypical and unusual file formats.
  3. Repository backs up its files on a regular basis according to current best practice.

VI.Take down Policy

  1. Author/Copyright Holder may request his or her items to be removed from the repository.
  2. Followings are acceptable reasons for withdrawal:
  • Journal publishers' rules;
  • Proven copyright violation or plagiarism;
  • Legal requirements and proven violations;
  • National Security;
  • National Interest;
  • Falsified research; and
  • At University of Mandalay’s discretion
  1. Withdrawn items are not deleted per se, but are removed from public view. Withdrawn items' identifiers/URLs are retained indefinitely. URLs will continue to point to 'tombstone' citations, to avoid broken links and to retain item histories.

4. Items will be deleted from the Repository if there is a legal requirement to do so, or if it is deemed by the University to be in its best interests. Deletion of items will mean removal of the item itself, plus any metadata. In this instance there will be no "tombstone" marker.

5. Changes to deposited items are not permitted.

6. If necessary, an updated version may be deposited. The earlier version may be withdrawn from public view.

7. In the event of University of Mandalay-Open Access Repository being closed down, the database will be transferred to another appropriate archive.

VII. End-user’s Terms and Conditions

Author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.

VIII.Dispute Resolution, Interpretation and Revision of the Policy

The Office of the Pro-rector, in consultation with the Open Access Working Group[4] will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending any revision of this policy.

IX. Policy Implementation, Management and Review

UM Central Library (and later departmental libraries) shall be responsible for managing the implementation of the policy and procedures as well as develop and monitor a plan for a service or mechanism that would render compliance with the policy that is appropriate, convenient and supportive of UM Authors, including adherence to archiving policies of publishers and funders.

This policy will be reviewed after every two years by the University’s Senate and Council.This policy must be related to following policies:

  • Intellectual Property Policy
  • Authorship Practices Policy
  • Publication Policy
  • Metadata and Information Architecture Policy

Signed by UM Rector Dr Thidar Win.

The original document is filed at the Office of the Academic Affairs.

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[2]The name of the University may be changed when it is granted autonomous status.It is informally referenced to as Mandalay University (MU).

[3]Main library of the University which is referred to as Mandalay University Library(MUL) or Library of the University of Mandalay

[4]This group will soon be reorganized as “Open Access Steering Committee” and its members will be reselected.