Open Access Publishing

Does UNCW have an open access policy?

University of North Carolina Wilmington does not have a campus-wide policy regarding open access publishing. However, the Faculty Senate has put forward a resolution in support of OA in recent years. See the UNCW Faculty Open Access Resolution page of this LibGuide for details.

Does UNCW have an open access agreement with my publisher?

UNCW has read-and-publish deals with several publishers. See the Open Access Pathways page of this LibGuide for a list of agreements that allow UNCW-affiliated authors to publish open access without incurring article processing charges.

You do not have an agreement with my publisher. Can you still pay my OA fees?

UNCW Library encourages authors to make their work open to read through the UNCW Institutional Repository whenever possible. Depositing your work in the repository makes it research findable for other scholars without requiring fees for author or reader. However, there is often an embargo period in which journal articles will be held before it can be made publicly available.

If UNCW Library does not have an agreement with your publisher, we are happy to help you locate fee-free open access journals, but the library has no other active mechanism by which to absorb your OA fees.

Can graduate students receive funding to cover OA publication fees?

If a UNCW graduate student is the corresponding author on an open access article, they may be able to have their fees waived if we have a read-and-publish agreement with the publisher.

When should I send the Institutional Repository a copy of my manuscript?

You can submit a copy of your pre-print (the draft of your article you submitted to your publisher) or post-print (your accepted manuscript after peer review but before publisher formatting) as soon after the acceptance or publication of your article as you’d like.

If you have not published in an open access journal and there is an embargo on articles published in your chosen journal, the IR can store your article but make it inaccessible until the date when it can be publicly shared.

For instructions on submitting to the UNCW Institutional Repository, see this LibGuide.

What is an embargo period?

An embargo period is a length of time in which access to the full-text version of an article is only available through subscription to the publisher’s journal or, in some cases, on an author’s personal website. To identify the standard copyright terms for a specific journal, you can use the Open Policy Finder tool.

During this time, you can submit a copy if your article to the Institutional Repository, but it will not be publicly accessible until the embargo has ended. You do not need to keep track of this time yourself. The Institutional Repository platform handles this process for us.

Can I deposit my data in the UNCW Institutional Repository?

The UNCW Institutional Repository is a great place for sharing your research articles, abstracts, conference proceedings, and student publications. For data, we recommend other repositories detailed on this LibGuide. Reach out to our Research Data Librarian through the links in that LibGuide for more information.