Schaffer Library advocates Open Access for many reasons. To name a few, OA helps solve the serials crisis, it facilitates research and teaching, it enables the benefits of a culture of sharing, and it advances economic and social justice by ensuring equal access to information.
That said, we are aware of the complexities of OA, so we do not advocate it in all circumstances. Indeed, OA should be eschewed when:
The keystone of our support of OA is our institutional repository, Digital Works. It is open to collecting the research and teaching outputs of Union College, which the depositor can make openly accessible should she or he wish; Digital Works is also available as a publishing platform for OA journals.
Publishing in Digital Works has a number of benefits:
For information on how to deposit or access materials in Digital Works, please contact digitalworks@union.edu.
Our Institutional Repository, Digital Works, can publish OA versions of your research and teaching outputs. These outputs include:
For the above, Digital Works can enable embargoes, provide permalinks, track altmetrics, facilitate discovery, concatenate related resources, and more.
Digital Works can publish student and faculty OA Journals. We currently publish The Adirondack Journal of Environmental Studies and Ephemeris: the Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy.
Primo, the Schaffer Library search interface, links to a wide array of OA resources and offers an Open Access facet, which enables the searching and finding of OA resources.
We support a number of Open Access initiatives through memberships and kickstarter grants: