Overall Rating Gold
Overall Score 66.30
Liaison Stephen Ellis
Submission Date May 31, 2024

STARS v2.2

Boston University
AC-11: Open Access to Research

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 2.00 / 2.00 Gabrielle Brewer
Sustainability Analyst
BU Sustainability
"---" indicates that no data was submitted for this field

Open access repository

Does the institution offer repository hosting that makes versions of journal articles, book chapters, and other peer-reviewed scholarly works by its employees freely available on the public internet?:
Yes

Website URL where the open access repository is available:
A brief description of the open access repository:
The Boston University Institutional Repository contains documents and publications authored or co-authored by BU faculty, students, and staff.

OpenBU is an open access repository, which means that the full text of the work deposited here is freely accessible to the world via the web. Access is restricted only in unavoidable instances, for example where publisher copyright restrictions prevail. However over 90% of scholarly publishers worldwide now allow some version of the documents they publish to be made available in a repository such as this.

Open access policy

Does the institution have a published policy that requires its employees to publish scholarly works open access or archive final post-peer reviewed versions of scholarly works in an open access repository?:
Yes

A copy of the institution's open access policy:
The institution's open access policy:
In 2015, Boston University adopted an opt-out open access policy for all faculty-authored scholarly articles, which allows BU to make these articles openly available in OpenBU, the university’s institutional repository.

The open access policy can be found at: http://www.bu.edu/disc/files/2017/10/Open-Access-Policy-2015.pdf

Does the policy cover the entire institution? :
Yes

APC fund

Does the institution provide an open access article processing charge (APC) fund for employees?:
No

A brief description of the open access APC fund:
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Open access journal hosting

Does the institution provide open access journal hosting services through which peer-reviewed open access journals are hosted on local servers with dedicated staff who provide publishing support at no (or minimal) cost?:
Yes

A brief description of the open access journal hosting services:
Open Access (OA) is a movement that advocates for free accessiblity of content, usually online, to the public. In academia, OA literature provides an alternative to the currently unsustainable practice of allowing access to academic research solely through subscriptions.

Increasingly, journal subscriptions are becoming prohibitively expensive, and as institutions are forced to cut journal subscriptions, the number of people able to access, view, build upon and cite these research articles decreases.

The OA model of scholarly communication provides greater dissemination of research, as people can view scholarly articles regardless of institutional affiliation or finances. Institutional repositories, like OpenBU, and public repositories, like NIH’s PubMed Central, are hubs for OA literature, and provide a place to showcase the work of a university, or taxpayer-funded research.

OA hosting services include but are not limited to: bioRxi, SPARC, and SHARE.
URL:https://www.bumc.bu.edu/medlib/portals/open-access/

Optional Fields 

Estimated percentage of peer-reviewed scholarly works published annually by the institution’s employees that are deposited in a designated open access repository:
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Website URL where information about the institution’s support for open access is available:
Additional documentation to support the submission:
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Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
This represents FY2023 BU metrics.

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.