Open Access Scholarship

Rutgers Open Access Policy and SOAR

Rutgers University passed an open access policy by a near unanimous vote of the University Senate in October 2012. The policy went into effect on September 1, 2015. With this policy, Rutgers joins the ranks of premier research institutions which support open access, and responds to the call for increased public access to taxpayer-funded and university supported research. Download and read the full text of the Rutgers Open Access Policy

The policy applies to all Rutgers faculty and scholars, including doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars. It applies mainly to scholarly articles (as the publisher allows), accommodates disciplinary differences, and focuses on public access for readers and researchers. 

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Interested in how open access can benefit your students? Learn about our Open and Affordable Textbooks initiative.

SOAR (Scholarly Open Access at Rutgers) has been developed as a convenient website where Rutgers scholars can deposit their work and access further information about open access. Rutgers authors deposit legal copies of scholarly articles into SOAR at the time of the article’s final acceptance for publication, at no cost to them, making scholarship freely accessible to readers and researchers worldwide on the Internet. SOAR staff will research all permissions for you at the time of deposit. SOAR is crawled by Google, and ensures access over time. Once it's deposited, you'll receive a permanent link for your article that you can use on your website, CV, courseware, and for social networking.

Questions about SOAR or the Rutgers OA Policy? Email soarhelp@libraries.rutgers.edu