2007-2008 Motions

September 19, 2007 Faculty Senate Meeting

No motions

October 17, 2007 Faculty Senate Meeting

Proposed Amendment to Bylaws of the Faculty Senate

Article IV Section 5: Change to read as follows

Article IV Section 5. Research and Scholarship Committee

A. Function. The Committee on Research and Scholarship reviews and makes recommendations to the Senate in matters relating to research including research priorities, research funds, patents, the protection of human and animal subjects, and research safety.

B. Membership. The members of the Committee on Research and Scholarship are the Vice President for Research, and one faculty Senator from each college.

Add the following section to Article IV of the Bylaws

Article IV Section 9: Service & Outreach Committee

A. Function: Reviews and makes recommendations to the Senate regarding service and outreach issues and opportunities that affect the university and its communities.

B. Membership: At least one member from each of the colleges, and one faculty Senator from Cooperative Extension.

This motion is a change to the By-Laws of senate and so has gone through the process of proposal, sending out for comment during a 45 day period, and discussion in senate.

There was no discussion at this time.

Voting Result: Motion passed unanimously.

November 11, 2007 Faculty Senate Meeting

No motions

December 12, 2007 Faculty Senate Meeting

Motion to Reauthorize The University of Maine Policy on Program Creation and Reorganization

Whereas a motion was passed by the Faculty Senate on October 18, 2006 creating the Program Creation and Reorganization Review Committee (PCRRC); and

Whereas in February 2007 the Faculty Senate approved The University of Maine Policy on Program Creation and Reorganization; and

Whereas this was signed into policy by the President in March 2007; and

Whereas there was an agreement to review this policy one year after its implementation; and

Whereas the Constitution of the Faculty Senate establishes its jurisdiction and responsibility to make recommendations regarding academic matters, including program creation and reorganization; and

Whereas the PCRRC and the administration have demonstrated that The University of Maine Policy on Program Creation and Reorganization is an excellent example of procedures that promote shared governance by providing a process for considering reorganization proposals;

Therefore

The Committee of the Elected Members moves that The University of Maine Policy on Program Creation and Reorganization be reauthorized by the Faculty Senate and recommended to the President as standing policy.

Voting Result: motion passed unanimously.

UMaine Faculty Senate Academic Motion 2007-08 Number 2

Whereas, the Faculty Senate has requested the opportunity to nominate faculty for participation on:

Provost’s Promotion and Tenure Advisory Committee (4 nominees, to be staggered terms),

Provost’s Faculty Advisory Committee (6 nominees from which 4 are selected, plus the senate president), and

Academic Affairs Budget Advisory Team (6 nominees from which 4 are selected, plus the senate president);

And whereas the Provost has offered the opportunity for the Faculty Senate to nominate the faculty to serve on these committees;

Therefore, the Faculty Senate and the Administration agree that the Faculty Senate will forward nominations for all faculty appointed to each committee.

Voting Result: motion passed unanimously.

UMaine Faculty Senate Motion 2007-08 Number 3

Whereas, because the President and the Vice President of the Faculty Senate are both going to be away from campus during January and part of February,

Therefore, the Faculty Senate affirms that Beth Wiemann will be President Pro-Tem during their absence.

Voting Result: motion passed unanimously.

January 30, 2008 Faculty Senate Meeting

No motions

February 27, 2008 Faculty Senate Meeting

No Motions

April 2, 2008 Faculty Senate Meeting

Announcement of a Proposed Amendment to the Bylaws to the Constitution of the Faculty Senate:

Officially Designating “Past President”

The President of Faculty Senate serves for a one-year term, after which many go off the Senate. The loss of the past president to the Senate hinders ongoing momentum, leaving the new president to serve without the benefit of the former president’s institutional memory and experience.

In order to create a more seamless transition from one Faculty Senate president to the next, the Constitution and Bylaws Committee is suggesting the following be added to the ByLaws, Article IV, Section 1B.

Section 1B:

The immediate past president of the Senate will hold, for a period of one year, the designation “Past President” and will serve as a non-voting member of the Senate Executive Committee and hold a seat at Senate meetings.

Voting Result: The motion was made, seconded. A vote was called. Motion passed unanimously.

Announcement of a Proposed Amendment of the Bylaws to the Constitution of the Faculty Senate: Additional Areas of Responsibility for the University Environment Committee

The Senate routinely is asked to review and make recommendations on items that relate to the natural environment on campus and to family and gender issues; however, there is nowhere in the charge to the Standing Committees that includes these important roles.

The Constitution and Bylaws Committee, in conjunction with the University Environment Committee, is suggesting the following be added to Article IV, Section 3A of the Bylaws: (The proposed additions are underlined.)

Section 3. UNIVERSITY ENVIRONMENT COMMITTEE

A. Function. The Committee on the University Environment reviews and makes recommendations to the Senate in matters relating to the academic and physical environment of the university including cultural programs; free speech and assembly; athletics; public relations; residential life; conduct; safety; facilities; recycling, energy and resource conservation; and family and gender issues.

Voting Result: Motion was made, seconded, motion passed unanimously.

Motion of Support for the University of Maine’s Mission Statement

Preamble

In 2007, a Committee of the Administration was formed to review and update the University’s Mission Statement. The committee consisted of six faculty members, one from each College and one from Cooperative Extension, including Pat Burns (Liberal Arts and Sciences), Catherine Elliott (Cooperative Extension); Dianne Hoff (Education and Human Development), Scott Johnson (Natural Sciences, Forestry, and Agriculture), Michael Peterson, chairperson (Engineering), and Robert Strong (Business, Public Policy, and Health). Four of the six faculty members also served on the Faculty Senate, including the chairperson. Dan Sandweiss (Dean and Associate Provost for Graduate Studies) also served on the committee, and Len Kass coordinated our efforts within the broader context of the NEASC self-study.

The committee worked collaboratively to analyze the existing Mission Statement, explore models used by other campuses, and brainstorm key points for a revised version. Over 50 drafts of a new mission statement were written and circulated among the committee in an iterative process over four months.

In December 2007 a preliminary draft was distributed at the Faculty Senate and Provost for comment. Although it is impossible to incorporate every person’s specific suggestions, the committee considered all input and made further revisions, which are incorporated in the version below. If the Senate endorses this Mission Statement, it will next go to the President for approval and will be incorporated into the NEASC Self-Study, under Standard One, “Mission and Purpose.” (All 11 NEASC standards will be available for review by the faculty and community at large later this spring.) Once all campus approvals have been obtained, the Mission Statement will be sent to the Board of Trustees for final approval. It will then become the official Mission Statement of the University of Maine.

Motion

The Faculty Senate of the University of Maine endorses the 2008 revision of the University Mission Statement, and encourages the committee to move the document to the President and the Board of Trustees for approval.

There was some discussion regarding the mission statement, with one person suggesting that it be re-worded to be more upbeat.

Voting Result: The Motion was tabled.

MOTION PREAMBLE

Action Plan for Implementing a University of Maine Institutional Repository

Report by the Library Advisory Committee of the Faculty Senate

Should the University of Maine support an Open Access Institutional Repository?

Yes. Many universities have been around longer than the nations in which they reside. For long term archiving of the most valuable products of their own students and faculty Universities are a better bet for long-term stability than many of the alternatives. If scholarly products are deposited using open access licenses, the products can be mirrored in disciplinary depositories (physics, chemistry, etc.) as well as the more general repositories being developed by others. This helps ensure their long-term survivability and increased accessibility through evolving search tools. An institutional repository allows each campus scholar, if they so desire, to create a long-term legacy collection of their scholarly works as those works are created. More than 1,000 other universities worldwide already have launched institutional repositories, <http://www.opendoar.org/index.html>.

Funding Agency Policy Trends: On 26 December 2007, President Bush signed an appropriations bill instructing the NIH to mandate open access for NIH-funded research. The NIH was clearly ready and released the text of its policy just 16 days later. (NIH policy: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-08-033.html, FAQ for the new policy: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm). The policy applies to all peer-reviewed articles that arise, in whole or in part, from direct costs funded by NIH, or from NIH staff, that are accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008. Thus articles arising from currently funded NIH projects must also meet this requirement. Beginning on 27 May 2008 anyone submitting an application, proposal or progress report to the NIH must include the Pub Med Central or NIH Manuscript Submission reference number when citing applicable articles that arise from their NIH funded research. For more information, consult http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-08.htm

Actions by other funding agencies could occur just as quickly. Other agencies such as NSF are more likely to allow reference to any long-term institutional or disciplinary repository. For example, the European Research Council now requires that the intellectual works resulting from its funding be placed in open access repositories but, unlike NIH, encourages placement in the author’s institutional repository. The University of Maine needs a repository allowing scholars from across all of its disciplinary domains to have a ready long-term repository for their works.

What types of scholarly materials should the UMaine repository support?

Our recommendation is to plan for the future. Allow for the ingesting, open access licensing and metadata documentation of all forms of non-royalty-producing scholarly work products , e.g. research reports, journal articles, teaching materials, data sets upon which research results are based, student portfolios, music, video, and all major new file types as they emerge. Note that the new NIH policy applies to all graphics and supplemental materials that are associated with the article.

The choice of repository software system should be determined by the products to be ingested and the documentation and linking services to be offered. Open source software such as D-space, Fedora and similar content management systems (e.g. typo3) with large support bases in the academic and non-profit communities should be high on the list for consideration. The repository should be a resource for archiving the productivity of researchers, faculty, students and staff at the University of Maine and made available for personnel on all UMS campuses.

Action: Document the benefits and drawbacks of each major repository software system option and the initial and continuing costs of each option. Arrive at a specific option recommendation and a proposal for covering the costs.

What are the potential challenges with instituting an institutional repository?

Costs: The leading open source repository software is now well-established and relatively straightforward to install and maintain. Contributors use a web interface to upload their own works, license their works, and provide information about their contribution (i.e. create “metadata”). The entire process only takes a few minutes for the typical professor or student after having walked through the system once. The process is very user friendly. Thus, there is little need to provide cataloging or even “web-form completion help services” by library staff. Once installed, the library’s primary burden is maintaining and upgrading the hardware and software infrastructure, providing regular backups for the content, installing new versions of software or expanding capabilities over time, and removing challenged materials until such challenges are resolved.

Lack of Deposits: By far the greatest concern in instituting such a repository as observed through the experiences of other universities is lack of extensive use of the facility by faculty and students for depositing their works due to lack of incentives to do so. Closer to home, the history of deposits of electronic theses and dissertations on our own campus offers such a lesson. That is, most theses deposited are from departments that require it. The cost of implementing a repository is very small compared to the substantial benefits and visibility we would gain by making our university knowledge advancements accessible to the world. However, even with a small investment, we should maximize our return on that investment by providing non-monetary incentives that ensure widespread deposits by our faculty, researchers and students.

What incentives should we provide that will encourage researchers, faculty and students to deposit their research, scholarly, creative, and teaching works within such a repository?

First, train our emerging scholars by engaging them in the practice of open archiving and showing them that an open access deposit can strongly support their publication and scholarly advancement interests. We should mandate all thesis and dissertation submissions be placed in the electronic repository as a condition of graduation. This precedent is already well established for two programs on campus and has created little to no controversy for students. In fact, students have said they would much rather have their work freely accessible to the world electronically than have the university sell rights to a private company to distribute their work for which they receive no economic compensation. A new repository software system could provide an option allowing students to embargo the release of their electronic thesis for up to a specified time (e.g. 6 months or a year) with the simple click of a check box. After that time tolls, the full text document is automatically made available to the world through the repository and picked up by search engines. For a discussion on why open access to electronic theses and dissertations should be mandated, consult http://publications.drdo.gov.in/ojs/index.php/djlit/article/viewFile/252/104

There should be no campus mandates for faculty requiring them to deposit any works in the campus repository. Rather non-monetary incentives that provide immediate visible benefits and user-friendly enablement technologies should be sufficient to generate enthusiastic use of the repository by most faculty and researchers.

Action: Work with the graduate board to explore and, if strong graduate board support exists, pursue the requirement of mandating that all thesis and dissertation submissions be placed in the existing thesis repository or the new institutional repository as a condition of graduation.

What are the specific actions that need to be taken to create appropriate incentives to contribute?

(1) Provide legal clarity for the works provided to the university repository.

Issue: The University of Maine System (UMS) intellectual property policy already makes it very clear that, in terms of claims between employees or students and the University administration, faculty and student authors have copyright interest in the vast majority of their scholarly and teaching materials and the university disclaims little to no legal copyright interest in them. The UMS policy further encourages faculty and students to use this clear legal authority to license their works to the “commons” or “public domain” using open access licenses. Thus, the official university policy is to encourage you NOT to give up your copyright to publishers, or at least retain the right to place your work openly on your university website and/or a repository of the university.

Action: When the UMS open access license policy was initially instituted in 2002, a specific open access license was recommended. Since then, over 50 million web sites and documents have been licensed using Creative Commons (CC) licenses. This suite of licenses is now the standard and we should make a slight revision to the UMS IP policies recommending these open access licenses for faculty and students. As such, these also would be the licenses used in conjunction with the repository software. Develop the language to alter the UMS policy and pursue the change.

Action: In implementing the software, separate CC licenses should be recommended automatically for creative works (journal articles, books, videos) versus datasets but authors should have the option of choosing less recommended open access licenses for either if authors prefer them. An automatic embargo option capability should be provided. Explore the software options for accomplishing these goals.

Issue: Most scholarly publishers request that authors sign a form copyright agreement the terms of which were written by that publisher. As a result of the high price of scholarly journals, the widespread organized resistance by the academic community, and the emergence of growing numbers of highly respected open access journals (e.g. http://www.doaj.org) through a marketplace reaction, over ninety percent of private scholarly publishers now allow scholarly authors to deposit their own journal articles in their own university or other not-for-profit electronic repositories, <http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php>.

Action: The University of Maine should pass a policy stating: It is the formal policy of the University of Maine to highly encourage all faculty, staff and students to (a) deposit final copies of all their published scholarly works within the electronic University of Maine Institutional Repository (UMIR) using the licensing mechanisms provided through the system, (b) submit their articles and other scholarly works to those journals and other outlets that allow the deposit of such works in the UMIR, and (c) serve as editors and reviewers primarily of those scholarly outlets that allow the deposit of scholarly works produced by University of Maine community members within the UMIR. Prepare the specific suggested language for the new policy.

Action: Create a standard University of Maine Publisher Agreement Addendum that comports with the above policy. Rather than negotiating terms with publishers, faculty may then simply add in the following language at the bottom of any publisher form contract that they are requested to sign:

All terms as listed above are subject to predominant rights and terms established by the University of Maine Publisher Agreement Addendum (UMPAA) that may be found at http://xxx.umaine.edu and is made a part of this agreement.

Prepare and review appropriate language for this document for use by faculty and students.

If the scholarly publisher refuses to accept this statement (most will accept it), the author may still publish with that publisher but the work could not be included in the UMIR. This will likely result in considerably less visibility compared to the work that is openly archived. Studies have shown that open access articles (including those published in non-open access journals and deposited in an open access repository) are cited 50-250% times more often than non-open access articles published in the same issues of the same journals, <http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html>.

(2) Request the open access URL for each item listed on a faculty member’s vita when that vita is submitted within any campus review process.

Issue: As evidenced by the new NIH policy, there is a requirement trend emerging within proposal submission and research reporting environments across science that asks for open access URLs so that any scientist in the world may help in the review process. If open access URL’s are requested, faculty have an incentive to provide them. This campus can provide the enabling technology through its institutional repository system to make the deposit and linking of scholarly products simple.

Action: Request that various campus award committees alter their application requirements to include a request for the open access URLs where the applicant’s work products may be viewed. Prepare suggested revisions to the several standard applications for campus awards, including applications for promotion and tenure that will now request open access URL links for the scholarly products that the applicant is reporting.

(3) Provide user-friendly enabling technology for faculty to automate the generation of vitas in various formats from the Faculty/Staff Profile Database.

Action: Revise the online faculty profile database <https://library.umaine.edu/fsprofile/index.aspx> so that it requests open access URLs for any work products reported, in addition to any restricted URLs where the work may be available. This open access URL could be to a server located anywhere but our UMaine repository is likely to be the easiest to reference. The faculty profile database should be tied to the institutional repository such that faculty may upload and document their papers if they are not already in the repository. If a faculty member does not provide an open access URL when reporting their scholarly productivity, the link obviously will not be supplied from the database when a report is automatically generated. The explicit action is to show the additional items to be requested within the Faculty/Staff Profile Database.

Action: Alter the online Faculty/Staff Profile Database to make it of substantially increased benefit to faculty by automating the generation of vitas, reports and award applications. The output may be in Word or another format of the faculty member’s choosing. Thus the report may be edited but most basic information will already be there in the proper format. The explicit action is to provide the list of reports and award applications that will be automatically populated with the faculty member’s data and generated with a single click.

MOTION

The proposed actions above are approved in concept by the University of Maine Faculty Senate. The Library Advisory Committee of the Faculty Senate is charged by the Faculty Senate to pursue, in collaboration with the University Maine library, the implementation of an institutional repository on the UMaine campus. In doing so, it should investigate and pursue with other appropriate committees and authorities on and off the University of Maine campus the items labeled above as actions.

Voting Results: This motion was moved, seconded, and passed.

May 7, 2008 Faculty Senate Meeting

Motion to Support the University of Maine’s Mission Statement

Mission Statement

The University of Maine advances learning and discovery through excellence and innovation in undergraduate and graduate academic programs while addressing the complex challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century through research-based knowledge.

Opportunity for all members of the University of Maine community is a cornerstone of our mission. The University welcomes students, research partners, and collaborators into an atmosphere that honors the heritage and diversity of our state and nation.

Founded in 1865, the University of Maine is a Land and Sea Grant institution and the flagship campus of the University of Maine System. This vibrant and dynamic university serves the residents of Maine, the nation, and the world through our acclaimed programs in teaching, research, and outreach.

Inspiring and dedicated teaching propels students into new fields of learning and promotes interdisciplinary understanding. Our educational goal is to help students develop their creative abilities, communication and critical thinking skills, and understanding of traditions in ethics and rationality within the arts, sciences, and professions.

Internationally-recognized research, scholarship, and creative activity distinguish the University of Maine as the state’s flagship university, where faculty and students contribute knowledge to issues of local, national, and international significance. As the state’s doctoral-granting institution, research and education are inextricably linked.

Comprehensive outreach, including public service, cooperative extension, continuing education, and distance learning, engages learners of all ages in improving their lives and communities. Using research-based knowledge, outreach efforts promote sustainable use of Maine’s abundant natural resources, and build intellectual, cultural, and economic capacity throughout Maine and beyond.

Through integrated teaching, research and outreach, the University of Maine improves the quality of life for people in Maine and around the world, and promotes responsible stewardship of human, natural, and financial resources.

Preamble

In 2007, a committee of the Administration was formed to review and update the University’s Mission Statement. The committee consisted of six faculty members, one from each College and one from Cooperative Extension, including Pat Burns (Liberal Arts and Sciences), Catherine Elliott (Cooperative Extension), Dianne Hoff (Education and Human Development), Scott Johnson (Natural Sciences, Forestry and Agriculture), Michael Peterson, chairperson (Engineering), and Robert Strong (Business, Public Policy, and Health). Four of the six faculty members also served on the Faculty Senate, including the chairperson. Dan Sandweiss (Dean and Associate Provost for Graduate Studies) also served on the committee, and Len Kass coordinated our efforts within the broader context of the NEASC self-study.

Motion

Voting Result: The motion passed.