East Carolina University
AC-11: Open Access to Research

The ScholarShip is a digital archive for the scholarly output of the ECU community. Its mission is to capture, preserve and make available the intellectual output of East Carolina University's faculty, staff, and students. ECU faculty, students, and staff can also deposit their final research datasets in Dataverse, hosted at UNC Chapel Hill through an agreement with a state-wide group called NC Docks.

There is no university-wide policy that requires its employees to publish scholarly works open access, but there are several resources to support those who wish to publish their work in open access repositories:
- ScholarShip Depository: open access institutional repository
- Dataverse Repository: open access of final research datasets
- Open Science Framework: a workspace where the ECU community can make research and data available open access.
- Open Access Publishing Support Fund: Offsets the cost of article processing charges associated with open access publishing
- Transformative Agreements: multiple agreements with publishers to reduce or remove the article processing charges for open access publishing.
- Open Educational Resources: ECU Libraries support faculty who wish to incorporate, adapt, or created open educational resources to use in the courses. This is part of the ECU Libraries’ textbook affordability initiatives. These initiatives also include a mini-grant provide that provides $1,000 to faculty who want to include open and/or free course materials into their classes.

Federal Public Access Policy Compliance: The White House Office of Science & Technology Policy’s (OSTP) February 22, 2013 memorandum Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research describes requirements for providing public access to federally funded scientific research publications and digital data sets. OSTP directed all agencies with greater than $100 million in yearly research and development expenditures to prepare a plan for improving the public’s access to the results of federally funded research. The requirements of each plan apply to researchers both within the Federal Government (intramural) and in organizations funded by the Federal Government (extramural). ECU Libraries support faculty with making their research articles available in PubMedCentral or another appropriate repository to be in compliance with public access policies.

East Carolina University Libraries are committed to supporting the research, publishing, and scholarly communication activities at ECU. To reduce barriers to open access publishing and to support faculty, staff, and graduate students who choose open access publishing as the best venue for their work, ECU has established the Open Access Publishing Support Fund (OAPSF). More information is available here: https://lib.ecu.edu/scholcomm/oapubfund

In addition to the Open Access Publishing Support Fund, ECU Libraries has multiple agreements with publishers to provide reduced or free open access publishing in journals. More information can be found here: https://sustainablescholarship.ecu.edu/open-access-publishing-support/. These initiatives are part of our focus on sustainable scholarship: https://sustainablescholarship.ecu.edu/our-values/

ECU Libraries has an instance of Open Journal Systems and hosts five open access journals: https://libguides.ecu.edu/OJS

Data Source: Jeanne Hoover, Joyner Library