Open Access

The Coastal Carolina University Libraries strives to facilitate access to information. Library faculty and staff support the 2016 Association of College & Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Open Access statement, which encourages the free, transparent, equitable, and immediate dissemination of scholarship and provides for increased visibility, shareability, and retention of authors’ rights. 

Therefore, the Coastal Carolina University Libraries faculty and staff will endeavor to make our own research openly available whenever possible by working with publishers that have adopted open access policies or that allow authors to self-archive their publications online. If working with publishers that do not support open access, we will try to negotiate with publishers to improve publication agreements. We will also attempt to focus reviewing and editing activities on open access manuscripts and publications. 

The Coastal Carolina University Libraries encourages other university departments to consider adopting similar open access statements and will assist in these efforts by: 

• Providing guidance about how authors can retain rights to their published work. 
• Encouraging faculty to use the CCU Digital Commons to openly publish their work. 
• Supporting the cost of open access publishing through transformative agreements, whereby payment to open access publishers shifts from the author to the library. 

Faculty should contact their liaison librarian if they would like assistance or if they have any questions.