Open Access

Why We Support OA

Schaffer Library advocates Open Access to facilitate research and teaching, enable the benefits of a culture of sharing, and advance economic and social justice by ensuring equal access to information. 

There are complexities to OA, however, and we do not advocate it in all circumstances. Indeed, OA should be eschewed when:

• it impinges upon privacy rights (such as with the publication of sensitive data).
• it hinders tenure and promotion (such as when choosing between publishing in either a highly ranked toll-access journal or a lesser ranked OA journal).
• OA's author-pays model (rather than toll-access's audience-pays model) is unaffordable

How We Support OA

The keystone of our support of OA is our institutional repository, ARCHES. It is open to collecting the research and teaching outputs of Union College, which the depositor can make openly accessible; ARCHES is also available as a publishing platform for OA journals. 

Publishing in ARCHES has a number of benefits:

• Increased visibility: The visibility of its publications are indexed in Google / Google Scholar and search engine optimized so that its holdings are almost always first page results when queried.
• Citation Impact: OA publications may be cited more frequently than toll-access publications.
  • (That said, this claim is being debated by scholars, just as it is questionable whether frequent citation is a valid measure of research impact.)
• Permalinks: Your publications will receive permanent URLs, so you can share them via your CV, website, etc.
• Retain ownership and copyright: Publishing in ARCHES enables you to assert your rights as an author to openly share your research.
• Meet funder requirements for OA publication.

For information on how to deposit or access materials in ARCHES, please contact digitalservices@union.edu.

Our Institutional Repository, ARCHES, can publish OA versions of your research and teaching outputs. These outputs include:

• Student Honors Theses
• Article pre-prints & embargoed post-prints
• Grey literature (e.g. presentations, lecture / field notes, working papers, etc.)
• Open Educational Resources (e.g. lecture videos / notes, syllabi, lesson plans, assignments and assessments, etc.)
• Data / Code / Digital Files

ARCHES can enable embargoes, provide permalinks, and facilitate discovery. 

For more information about research data management, view our data management guide.

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: 

• Lever Press 
• Reveal Digital 
• SPARC