Library Services for Faculty

Research is different at colleges that at universities or companies. There are also different umbrellas under which college educators may be conducting research. Make sure to understand how Intellectual Property and Copyright is handled under your research plan. Those decisions will affect if Open Access is an option or needs to be part of a larger conversation.

DOAJ's mission:

DOAJ's mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language. DOAJ will work with editors, publishers and journal owners to help them understand the value of best practice publishing and standards and apply those to their own operations. DOAJ is committed to being 100% independent and maintaining all of its services and metadata as free to use or reuse for everyone.

Search its close to 5 000 000 articles from close to 15 000 journals contributed by researchers in 133 countries. Or browse by subject area to see the breadth and depth of open journals in your discipline.

For ease of use, DOAJ journals are also discoverable using the Library's catalogue. And while all Library resources (open and fee-based) can be used in your courses because of the Library's purchasing and curating power, it is still interesting to note and support resources committed to free and open sharing of information and growth of knowledge.

Your Librarians are here to help! Different open access journals can have different processes and your Librarians can assist you in navigating the processes and procedures involved in publishing.

If you are applying for research assistance from one of Mohawk's Applied Research hubs, make sure to factor in Article Processing Charges 0-$ for Open Access and $-$$$$ for traditional channels.

Another, likely more important consideration is the ownership of your work. Open Access promotes creators retaining ownership while traditional channels often transfer copyright to the publisher or limit what the creator can do with their own research.

As with most things, open access publishing is not black and white. SUNY created a helpful flowchart to highlight different options under open access publishing.