Scholarly Communications and Open Access Policy

"Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost. Unlike fixed, copyrighted resources, OER have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights" (OER Commons, CC BY-SA)

Open Educational Resources allows educators to:

• retain the right to make, own and control,
• reuse,
• revise,
• remix, 
• redistribute

 (SPARC: Open Education)

Open Research Data:

• Shared research data sites.
• U.S. Government open data site
• Open notebook science projects 
• Open Source Development Network
• SourceForge open source software network

Open Access Journal Articles and Pre-preprints:

• Journal article pre-prints and manuscript repositories by discipline.
• Journal articles in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Open Books:

• PQDT Open dissertations and theses from Proquest
• Collections and books in the HathiTrust Digital Library

• Project Gutenberg ebooks

Open Course Content and Textbooks:

• Course content from the Open Courseware Consortium.
• Textbooks from the College Open Textbooks project.

Open Standards from Open Standards.net.

Open Science: 
Open Science represents a new approach to the scientific process based on cooperative work and new ways of diffusing knowledge by using digital technologies and new collaborative tools (European Commission, 2016b:33). The OECD defines Open Science as:  “to make the primary outputs of publicly funded research results – publications and the research data – publicly accessible in digital format with no or minimal restriction” (OECD, 2015:7)

• Foster Open Science contains advice on making each step of scientific process more open.
• Open Science MOOC has modules for teaching Open Science for students and researchers.
• CORE aggregates articles and data with APIs to facilitate open science.

The Binghamton University Libraries strive to provide service, support, and access to tools and materials for successful scholarly activity at BU. Page charges for scholarly journal articles can be required for publication of materials for Open Access or similarly named publishing models.

The Libraries recommends that researchers and authors consider the following when preparing manuscripts:

• Check with the funding agency program rules for allowing page charges. Some federal or state agencies are prohibited from using grant funds to pay for these charges.
• Designate a line item on your research grant budget for publication charges. Consult with Research Foundation staff or the Grant and Contract Administrator for your program on how best to document this information in your grant budget narrative.
• Check the author information in the journal. Any publication or page charge requirements should be clearly stated.

Why are there page charges? Previous subscription-based journal cost models are being replaced with Open Access and other similarly named policies. These models may require authors to pay a fee to make the article available to all researchers, not just those with a library subscription.

How can I tell if a journal has page charges for publication? There are lists of these journals available online, the most comprehensive of which is the Directory of Open Access Journals.

What is an embargo period? The length of time an article will be available to those with a current subscription to the journal. Embargo periods vary from a few months to longer than one year. Once this time has passed the article is available to everyone.

What do I do if I’m a co-author and my collaborator can’t pay the publication charge? All authors can contribute to the publication charge. Consult with your co-authors and their institutions prior to submitting your manuscript.