University of Maryland, College Park
AC-11: Open Access to Research

The Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM) collects, preserves, and provides public access to the scholarly output of the university. Faculty and researchers can upload research products for rapid dissemination, global visibility and impact, and long-term preservation.

University of Maryland researchers receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must comply with its Public Access Policy by ensuring that published results of NIH-funded research are publicly available. The university does not have a published policy that requires all of its employees to publish scholarly works open access or archive final post-peer reviewed versions of scholarly works in an open access repository, but in practice the university strongly encourages employees to consider publishing in open access journals or to add their publications to an open access repository. Staff at the university libraries provide support and tools to help researchers publish their scholarly works open access.

The UMD Libraries' Open Access Publishing Fund improves access to research produced at the University of Maryland and enables authors to retain their copyrights; accelerates the online availability of peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles generated by UMD researchers; raises campus awareness about the benefits of open access; and covers article processing charges (APCs) levied by peer-reviewed open access journals. Any UMD faculty member, post-doctoral researcher, or currently enrolled graduate or undergraduate student whose article has been accepted may apply for funding.

The University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries is pleased to announce that it has become the institutional home of SocArXiv, an interdisciplinary, open access repository of scholarship. The new partnership between the Libraries and SocArXiv ensures the future development and sustainability of the repository, which had previously received seed funding from the libraries at the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with additional support from the Sloan Foundation, the Open Societies Foundation, and the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at UMD. Working with partners, the UMD Libraries will sponsor SocArXiv to help sustain shared infrastructure for open scholarship and to provide equitable access to this diverse collection of research for scholars at UMD and around the world.