Overall Rating Silver - expired
Overall Score 54.99
Liaison Denice Koljonen
Submission Date Feb. 6, 2019
Executive Letter Download

STARS v2.1

Boston College
AC-11: Open Access to Research

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 0.00 / 2.00 Steve Runge
Learning Commons Manager
University Libraries
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How many of the institution’s research-producing divisions are covered by a published open access policy that ensures that versions of future scholarly articles by faculty and staff are deposited in a designated open access repository? (All, Some or None):
None / Don't Know

Which of the following best describes the open access policy? (Mandatory or Voluntary):
Voluntary (strictly opt-in)

Does the institution provide financial incentives to support faculty members with article processing and other open access publication charges?:
Yes

A brief description of the open access policy, including the date adopted, any incentives or supports provided, and the repository(ies) used:
BC authors are encouraged to and provided with tools for publishing their materials as open access. A library research guide provides information on all of the various ways in which BC supports open access initiatives, despite not having a mandate. These include advocacy (BC is a signatory of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), the foundational declaration on OA), OA journal publishing (13 journals at this time), financial support to important OA initiatives, including the HathiTrust, ArXiv, Independent Voices, Knowledge Unlatched, Open Library of the Humanities and SCOAP3, among others. BC does provide support to authors publishing in fully open access ("Gold OA"), scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. Funded by the Provost's Office, the library accepts applications and makes financial awards to reimburse authors' payments of OA publishing fees. The Boston College Libraries host an open access institutional repository, escholarship@bc. In addition to faculty publications that can be made available OA, escholarship@bc provides a permanent archive for dissertations and theses. BC graduates are strongly encouraged to make their theses and dissertations available with open access under a Creative Commons license. The BC Libraries also offer a BC Dataverse (hosted on the Harvard Dataverse platform) for deposition of data, preferably open data.

A copy of the institution's open access policy:
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The institution's open access policy:
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The website URL where the open access repository is available:
Estimated percentage of scholarly articles published annually by the institution’s faculty and staff that are deposited in a designated open access repository (0-100):
13

A brief description of how the institution’s library(ies) support open access to research:
In addition to administering an open access fund and an open access repository, we also provide a repository for open data (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/bc). In addition we provide publishing support for open access journals (https://libguides.bc.edu/openaccess/bcjournals). The Boston College Law Library also administers its own institutional repostitory: https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu . The Libraries also provide support to open access initiatives through its collections budgets, including the following: DOAJ, DOAB, Knowledge Unlatched, PLoS, HathiTrust, InternetArchive, ArXiv, Open Library of the Humanities, BioMedCentral, SCOAP3, etc.

The website URL where information about the programs or initiatives is available:
Additional documentation to support the submission:
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Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
According to the Scopus database, BC published 874 articles in 2018, and, of these, 113 were indexed as Open Access. We recognize that not all of these may have been deposited in an OA repository.

The information presented here is self-reported. While AASHE staff review portions of all STARS reports and institutions are welcome to seek additional forms of review, the data in STARS reports are not verified by AASHE. If you believe any of this information is erroneous or inconsistent with credit criteria, please review the process for inquiring about the information reported by an institution or simply email your inquiry to stars@aashe.org.