Since I’ve been critical of my former employer in these pages, it’s only fair that I should note something that makes me quite proud of the University of North Texas. The university has just published The Denton Declaration: An Open Data Manifesto. Here’s language describing it and the university’s hopes for it that comes from an email I received this afternoon.

The Declaration was developed in the wake of UNT’s 3rd Annual Open Access Symposium by a national panel of leaders in research data management. The Declaration emphatically states a vision for openness in research data that bridges the converging interests of diverse stakeholders and promotes collaboration, transparency, and accountability across organizational and disciplinary boundaries.

Please follow the link to read the Declaration, and please do share on social media and with colleagues at other institutions. We welcome others to join as co-signers.

And perhaps I can be forgiven the space to boast that this declaration is an outgrowth of UNT’s Electronic Thesis and Dissertation project which I helped to initiate back in 1996, when I wrote the first documents pertaining to that program and shepherded them through the required committee processes. That program has now expanded far beyond where it was when I retired at North Texas in 2002, and is now in more capable hands than mine. But I’m extremely proud of the part I played in its creation, and that makes me all the more proud to see today’s announcement.

This new document addresses the growing concern among academics and others that the cooption of much academic publishing by the for profit publishing industry has had a deleterious effect on the dissemination of research. Besides undermining the university presses (a task in which trustees and legislatures have shared), the publishing industry has swallowed up many academic journals, driven up the prices that libraries and others must pay for them, and now threatens to coopt online education.

—Bravo, North Texas!