SOAR Submission Policy - Faculty & Staff Scholarly and Creative Works

According to the SUNY Library and Information Services website, the SUNY Open Access Repository SOAR is “a centrally managed online digital repository that stores, indexes, and makes available scholarly and creative works of SUNY faculty, students, and staff across SUNY campuses.” SOAR is built on a DSpace architecture and saves metadata for each archived document in a series of common Dublin Core fields. This standardized structure used for description of resources provides consistency and effective retrieval across the platform.

The Sojourner Truth Library (STL) will make the scholarly and creative works created by current SUNY New Paltz faculty and staff available to the public in SOAR.  SOAR is not set up for individual faculty authors to submit their own work so the STL SOAR administrator will upload and describe the documents submitted to the repository.  

For faculty and staff who elect to contribute to SOAR through the OA policy, there will be the added labor of navigating current or past contracts with journals and determining what they are able to submit. Faculty and staff are responsible for figuring out the licensing agreements and if their publication can be hosted on a repository without violating existing copyright agreements. The STL faculty will not be able to assist with this portion of the process.  

Please contact your editor or publisher prior to submitting to ensure correct copyright permissions are in place. Sherpa Romeo or Transpose can also be used to review the copyright and self-archiving policies of many scholarly journals. When possible, you may want to speak with your publisher about submitting to this institutional repository during publication contract negotiations, before you have signed an agreement.  

After an article is published or shared through regular channels (by the primary publisher), each participating author will make available to Sojourner Truth Library (STL), at no charge, an electronic copy of their work respecting all embargoes and restrictions set by the primary academic publisher (if any) and/or by the author(s). Some publishers allow authors to archive either the original pre-print, revised manuscripts, or the final version that was accepted for publication, and the STL will accept these versions.  

There are several levels of open access that differ in terms of timing, licensing requirements, and cost. In a so-called “green” open access initiative, authors self-archive works in an institutional repository at no additional cost and must abide by the publisher’s restrictions. The publisher may require an embargo, typically a delay of 12-24 months, before deposited work may be made public. Authors may license their deposited work through Creative Commons but this is not required. If authors elect to add a Creative Commons license to their work, they have an array of options from which to choose.  

After submissions are received and approved, they will be archived on SOAR in 4-6 weeks. This policy allows submission of works published from 2020 – present. 

Please review the SOAR content guidelines, and FAQ page for more information about the general OA policy and licenses.