What is Open Access?
The principle of Open Access (OA) refers to making a complete version of a scholarly work freely available on the Internet without access restrictions and allowing it to be used or downloaded by the reader in any legal manner.
East Carolina University’s ScholarShip Digital Archive is designed to meet this standard.
By making your articles and other publications openly available in ECU’s Digital Archive, you will make them much more accessible to a variety of users, and thus much more likely to be read and cited. A number of scholarly studies have confirmed that OA articles are cited more heavily than restricted access materials. In addition to published works, the ScholarShip Digital Archive can also allow you to archive multimedia content such as music recitals and presentations. You will be able to retrieve usage statistics for all items that are archived in the repository.
The digital archive will also benefit ECU as an institution. It will enable this university to preserve and retain access to its own scholarly output, as well as making it available in one place to a wider audience than ever before. The Scholarship Digital Archive will stand as direct evidence of ECU’s status as a research university.
In order to submit a journal article for inclusion in ECU’s Digital Archive, you will need to make sure that the copyright agreement covering your article allows you to do so. A web resource called SHERPA/RoMEO provides information on publisher copyright agreements and their compatibility with OA. Contact either Joyner or Laupus Library for more information.
