A waiver to the policy will be granted if you have attempted unsuccessfully to retain rights needed to comply with the policy and make your article publicly available. Please request a waiver before submitting a signed author agreement to your publisher.
Steps for requesting a waiver:
- If your author agreement does not permit rights retention or deposit, try to negotiate with your publisher/editor to modify the author. If you correspond by email, please capture a copy of the exchange that concludes with a refusal to allow you to retain your rights.
- Send an email requesting a waiver for your article to the Director of University Libraries. Include:
- A specific request for a waiver of the University Library's Open Access Policy for a particular article,
- Your name, along with the names of any other faculty authors of the article,
- The article title,
- Name of the journal that will publish the article,
- Some description of your negotiating efforts (attaching email correspondence is an easy way to do this),
- And a copy of the final author agreement you intend to sign.
- Upon receipt of a return email acknowledging waiver of the policy, send your author agreement back to the publisher.
- Deposit a copy of your article in the Knowledge Bank specifying that it will be permanently embargoed. This ensures that the metadata for your article are included in the Library Faculty's collection.
Please keep in mind the following.
- Waivers are granted for individual articles (no blanket waivers for individual authors or particular journals are granted).
- There is no limit to the number of times you can request a waiver.
- If you publish repeatedly with a journal that has a history of not negotiating, please try again with each new article you submit. Journals or editors regularly change their policies if they receive repeated requests from authors.
- Even if the first author on your article is not a member of the University Libraries faculty, you still need to request a waiver if another author wants to sign an agreement that does not permit deposit of the article.