Library Policies

SUNY Maritime Open Access Policy – Approved by the Academic Council on March 12, 2020.

The purpose of this policy is to establish policies for making scholarly and creative works of SUNY Maritime College faculty, staff, and students available to a general audience in accordance with SUNY requirements on Open Access. The policy applies to works authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the faculty, a student, or a staff member except for works completed before the adoption of this policy, and any works for which the author entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. This policy does not require authors to publish in open access journals.

Maritime College will make scholarly work available to the public in an open access repository, hereby referred to as the institutional repository (IR). Hosted through a SUNY-wide platform, DSpace, Maritime College’s institutional repository collects, preserves, and provides online access to scholarship produced at the college. All SUNY campus instances of DSpace are searchable via a common interface. Maritime College’s Institutional Repository is administered at the local level by the Stephen B. Luce Library. The SUNY-wide DSpace digital repository is administered by SUNY OLIS (Office of Library and Information Service).

This policy reserves the right for authors to choose whether to make scholarly and creative work freely and openly available to the public. Each author may voluntarily submit scholarly or creative works and exercise the copyright in those works for the purpose of making articles freely and widely available the institutional repository. The repository will not link out to content that exists on other websites or through subscription databases.

It is the responsibility of the author to ensure compliance with the respective publisher(s)’ requirements and/or restrictions for submission. Authors who do not wish to make their work available in the repository are not required to do so and there will be no negative repercussions should they choose not to make their work available through the institutional repository. Material published within the institutional repository must adhere to federal and state laws as well as Maritime College policies, including policies on academic integrity. Scholarly work in the repository is held there permanently unless authors choose to remove it.

The policy recognizes the value of and supports authors retaining the rights to their intellectual property, while encouraging them to make their works freely and widely available. Since the author retains copyright of their works published in Maritime College’s institutional repository, works may be submitted for publication elsewhere. It is the author’s responsibility to notify the publisher that the work has been previously published in an institutional repository.

The college endorses the practice of authors depositing a preprint, post-print, or final version of each scholarly or creative work in the institutional repository at no cost to Maritime College. By doing so, each author retains his/her copyright and grants Maritime College nonexclusive permission to make that work available for the purpose of open access. The author’s copyright remains in effect. Users of the institutional repository may not copy, distribute, remix, resell, or create derivative works, except under exemptions made clear under copyright law, such as fair use.  

Works created at the direction of SUNY are subject to the SUNY Board of Trustees Patents, Inventions and Copyright Policy. Maritime College may not sell or otherwise profit from the distribution of works contributed to the institutional repository.

Nothing herein should prevent individual units from developing their own Open Access policies as long as they do not result in more restrictive access to scholarly and creative works than what is envisioned in this policy. The policy does not supersede existing SUNY policies concerning intellectual property.

The policy for Maritime College has been adapted from existing SUNY Open Access policies, as well as Rutgers University, and Duke University.