Kevin Hawkins, Assistant Dean for Scholarly Communication and Interim Head of Research Support Services, has been appointed for a two-year term beginning July 2019 on the steering committee for the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI), which includes representatives from North American universities and other institutions that have created or adopted policies on making research produced by the institution free to read online. UNT was the first public university in Texas to pass such a policy (in 2011), and Hawkins led a rewriting of the policy in 2017 to clarify its provisions. You can read more about the UNT Open Access Policy and about Open Access at UNT online.