The SUNY Maritime Open Access Policy was approved by the Academic Council on March 12, 2020. Through this policy, the Luce Library administers SUNY Maritime SOAR, an open access repository for Maritime College scholarly works to be available to the public.
The Luce Library encourages authors to publish their work with Open Access publishers. In doing so, your work will be available to students, colleagues, and the general public who do not normally have access to academic databases and academic publishers.
Are works in Open Access peer-reviewed?
Not all Open Access publishers are peer-reviewed. Look through the journal's website to find out if it is peer-reviewed.
Where can I find a peer-reviewed Open Access journal?
All journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) include a peer-review process. This is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
Is Maritime SOAR considered Open Access?
Yes! Check out the Maritime SOAR to learn more about it and how to submit your work.
Below are more Open Access Journals
The pressures on scholars to produce higher volumes of scholarly work along with the inclination to make that work freely available opens the door to predatory publishers. Predatory publishers have existed before online publishing and this issue is not new. Publishing under a predatory publisher can be a great risk including losing your copyright entirely.
Think. Check. Submit. is a website to help you identify trusted publishers. A useful tool is a checklist, a series of questions to ask yourself when you are not sure if the publisher can be trusted.
What is Open Access?
Open Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Open Access works fall under two main publishing categories:
Open Access Repositories (known as "Green" OA): Free online access to materials provided by the author (self-archived, or published in an institutional repository). Peer-reviewed, scholarly works published in conventional journals may also be published in an institutional repository or on a personal website to increase access.
Open Access Journals (known as "Gold" OA): Journals that automatically and immediately make their articles available online to all at no cost. (There are a variety of business models, but the articles are always free to read.) Open access journals can be searchable within a digital publisher’s collection. For example, EBSCO allows the user to limit searching to open access journals.
Why Support Open Access?
Open Access benefits the larger community of scholars, researchers, and community members because knowledge is not stuck in expensive, subscription-only databases. OA publishing, however, is not just altruistic- it benefits authors. If an article is an open access, it’s more likely to be read and more likely to be cited.