University at Buffalo
AC-11: Open Access to Research

The UB Institutional Repository (UBIR) collects, preserves, and distributes the University’s research and scholarship. UBIR is a group of collections of open access full-text articles, preprints, reports, audio mp3 files, images, datasets, and video clips produced by UB researchers and students.

The University’s Open Access Policy for Scholarly and Creative Works is an opt-in policy.

The University Libraries (UL) are a partner in the Toward an Open Monographic Ecosystem (TOME) initiative: https://www.openmonographs.org/. TOME is a five-year pilot project of the Association of American Universities, Association of Research Libraries, and Association of University Presses. The pilot is built on participating colleges and universities and on participating university presses. Participating institutions commit to providing baseline grants of up to $15,000 to support the publication of open access monographs. Participating university presses commit to producing digital open access editions of TOME volumes, openly licensing them under Creative Commons licenses, and depositing the files in selected open repositories. As a TOME partner, the UL provides subvention funding for the production of open access versions of scholarly monographs authored by UB scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

The Libraries are also a partner in the Public Library of Science (PLOS) Community Action Publishing (CAP) initiative: https://plos.org/resources/community-action-publishing/. CAP is the first sustainable open access solution that protects authors from the rising costs of selectivity; ultimately the goal is to eliminate APCs for all authors. With CAP, cost to publish is assessed based on publication needs of both corresponding and contributing authors, and therefore the cost of publishing is distributed equitably among representative institutions. The UL commits subvention funding by way of a yearly flat fee, ensuring the UB authors receive access to unlimited publishing opportunities in the journals PLOS Biology, PLOS Medicine, and PLOS Sustainability and Transformation.

A brief description of the open access journal hosting services.
The Libraries publishing and open access journal hosting initiative is a fledgling enterprise. Presently, the Libraries hosts one scholarly journal: The Reading Room: A Journal of Special Collections (https://readingroom.lib.buffalo.edu/). The Libraries is currently exploring two platforms for growing this initiative to accommodate the needs of UB scholars: Digital Commons (https://bepress.com/products/digital-commons/) and Ubiquity Press (https://www.ubiquitypress.com/). The Libraries is also in the process of hiring a Scholarly Publishing Librarian who will manage this undertaking.

Percentage of peer reviewed scholarly works harvested from the Web of Science and Dimensions databases by way of the State University of New York’s Office of Library Services.