Scholarly Research Impact

The term "open access" refers to research output that is

• immediately and freely available to anyone upon publication, and 
• free of many copyright restrictions that prevent the sharing of your work.

• Open access publishing can increase your research impact by making it visible to readers beyond those who have a subscription to the journal. This leads to increased citations and downloads of your work.
• Some funders (for example, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health) require the output of their funded research to be made openly accessible.

The UNCW Faculty Senate passed motion 2023-05-02:

Open Access Resolution for the Faculty Senate of University of North Carolina Wilmington 

The Faculty of the University of North Carolina Wilmington is committed to disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In particular, as part of a public university system, the Faculty is dedicated to making its scholarship available to the people of North Carolina and the world. Furthermore, the Faculty recognizes the benefits that accrue to themselves as individual scholars and to the scholarly enterprise from such wide dissemination, including greater recognition, more thorough review, consideration and critique, and a general increase in scientific, scholarly, and critical knowledge. In keeping with these considerations, and for the primary purpose of making our scholarly works widely and freely accessible, the Faculty adopts the following resolution. 

 To facilitate open access scholarly communication Faculty members are encouraged to seek venues for their works that will disseminate research and scholarship as widely as possible. In particular, when consistent with their professional development, members of the Faculty should endeavor to: 

• Include the costs of open access publishing in externally funded research budgets whenever possible; 

• Seek publishers for their works committed to free and unfettered access (open access publishers) whenever consistent with their professional goals; 

• Take advantage of negotiated open access publishing agreements to publish open access without cost (https://libguides.uncw.edu/c.php?g=1270376&p=9520491)  

• Amend copyright agreements to retain the right to use their own work and deposit such work in Seahawk DOCKS (http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncw/) or another repository that is freely accessible to the general public; or 

• Submit a final manuscript of accepted, peer-reviewed publications to Seahawk DOCKS or another repository whenever consistent with the copyright agreement. 

This resolution applies only to scholarly works authored or co-authored by a member of the Faculty since the adoption of this resolution. This resolution does not in any way prescribe or limit the venue of publication. This resolution neither requires nor prohibits the payment of fees or publication costs by authors. 

Adapted from the Open Access Resolution for the Academic Senate of The University of Maryland, Baltimore County.