Withdrawal
Academic Commons has been established to create permanently accessible digital versions of the items of scholarship created by members of the Stony Brook University community, a goal consonant with its responsibilities to preserve the intellectual record established at the university and to provide support for the research and learning missions of the university. The Academic Commons license agreement grants a perpetual license to the university to keep copies of deposited items available for purposes of preservation and access. The Academic Commons administrators strongly discourage requests for the removal of items from the libraries’ digital collections. Under certain circumstances, however, items that have been deposited into the Academic Commons repository may become candidates for withdrawal. The following policy outlines the circumstances under which repository items may become such candidates, and it specifies the steps entailed in removing acceptable withdrawal candidates.
Circumstances Leading to the Possibility of Document Withdrawal
(1) A copyright holder contacts Academic Commons concerning a copyright interest in one of the items held by Academic Commons.
(2) The author of an unrefereed, or non-peer-reviewed, publication requests the publication to be withdrawn from Academic Commons. This circumstance covers preprints as well as other less formal documents such as posters and slide show presentations.
(3) Stony Brook University reserves the right to remove content from the repository at any time and to modify its policy on content withdrawal. Further, Stony Brook University reserves the right to refuse a document withdrawal request for content to which it has already been granted perpetual preservation and access rights through the Academic Commons licensing agreement.
In keeping with the Stony Brook University Libraries’ mission and policy of collecting, preserving, and providing access to the intellectual record established by the Stony Brook University Community, Academic Commons administrators will not entertain withdrawal requests for published material that meets the Academic Commons collection scope specifications and is not the subject of a copyright concern inquiry. For example, a journal article in Academic Commons for which consent through the Academic Commons license agreement was acquired will be considered for removal from the repository only if a copyright claim is raised. A pre-print of that same article, however, would be eligible for consideration of removal by reason of author request.
Copyright Concerns
Access to the full text of the documents will be disabled for items against which a copyright concern is brought. Copyright challenges to Academic Commons content should be brought to the attention of Mona Ramonetti, Head of Scholarly Communication.
(1) Stony Brook University Libraries will disable access and may remove works from Academic Commons when there is an issue of copyright infringement. If a copyright-compliant version of the item in question is made available, it may replace the item in question. If the item cannot be replace with a compliant version, the record of the item will remain at the permanent URL with a note that explains the full-text has been withdrawn from Academic Commons.
(2) If the item’s presence on Academic Commons is found to be copyright compliant, access to the full text will be restored.
Author Withdrawal Requests
Requests for the withdrawal of informally published, non-peer-reviewed, or unrefereed scholarly documents should be issued to Mona Ramonetti, Head of Scholarly Communication. In the cases where document withdrawal is granted, access to the full text of the item will be discontinued immediately. The record for the item will remain on Academic Commons, indicating that the document was removed at the author’s request.
–adopted from “Purdue e-Pubs Document Withdrawal Policy”
