Florida Institute of Technology
AC-11: Open Access to Research

- The Scholarship Repository of Florida Institute of Technology provides permanent, open access to journal articles, research reports, conference papers, data sets, theses and dissertations, and other scholarly works created by Florida Institute of Technology faculty and students.
- Florida Tech has maintained an open-access Scholarship Repository since 2013. The university recently migrated the Scholarship Repository from a dSPACE to a Digital Commons platform, thereby enhancing its functionality in several areas. These include the ability to accommodate a broader range of file types associated with our areas of research, enhanced security through cloud-based rather than in-house storage, increased capacity, improved ease of navigation, and greater organizational flexibility.

- Florida Tech’s Evans Library has a policy of being “committed to participating in sustainable models of Open Access as a way to move scholarly communications from behind paywalls and create a more equitable system of knowledge for all."
- Since discontinuing the printing of theses and dissertations in 2015, Florida Tech has required all students to publish their theses and dissertations in our open-access Scholarship Repository. The Scholarship Repository is designed to facilitate ease of use and, with the aid of promotion throughout the university community, is widely utilized by university employees.
- Open Access publications are accessible through Florida Tech’s Evans Library’s online collections including databases, journal articles, ebooks, theses and dissertations. Moreover, the Library is a member of the Federal Depository Library System, through which it makes a wide array of open access U.S. Government publications available to both the university community and the general public.

- Florida Tech supports an Open Access Subvention Fund, described below, through which students and faculty are compensated for processing costs that can be associated with publishing papers in open-access journals. During FY2023, a total of $20,991.68 was awarded through this program.
- In addition, for FY2024, the Library has opted to pay an additional fee for subscriptions to the journals of some professional associations for transformative agreements, whereby open-access processing fees will be waived for Florida Tech authors submitting papers to the journals in question.
- Eligible individuals may apply for funding under the Florida Tech Open Access Subvention Fund upon acceptance of their article by a peer-reviewed open access journal. Details regarding eligibility and requirements include:
• To request funds, faculty authors fill out the Open Access Fund Request Form. The request will be reviewed for eligibility and the author informed whether it has been approved.
• Only current Florida Tech faculty, research scientists, graduate students and postdocs are eligible to receive funding.
• The university will provide funds for article-processing fees accrued when publishing in peer-reviewed OA journals that are:
o Listed in the Directory of Open Access Journal
o Members of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
o Have policies and practices consistent with the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association Code of Conduct, including:
 Published in a fully open-access format and have a publicly accessible published schedule of article processing fees
 Waive their fees in cases of financial hardship
 Immediately, openly accessible at publication; no delayed publishing or embargo periods are accepted.

- The new Digital Commons Scholarship Repository is capable of hosting journals which the College of Aeronautics on campus has inquired about.
- Evans Library at Florida Tech has an active Open Access (OA) program. We mark OA Week every fall with an array of talks, discussions, movies, and other activities to raise OA awareness on campus. We are supporting members of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and recruit speakers as part of each year’s OA programming.
- In addition, Florida Tech is a member of the phenomenal OA consortium for high energy physics, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3), which successfully flipped several existing commercial journals to OA over the past several years, resulting in double the prior downloads for these journals. Evans Library distributes funds to cover OA Author Publishing Charges through our Open Access Subvention Fund. Finally, we host an institutional repository known as the Scholarship Repository, featuring OA published works by our faculty.

Information for AY 2022-23 based on consultations with Evans Library faculty librarians who manage electronic theses and dissertations, the Scholarship Repository and Open Access Subvention Fund, particularly, Rob Sippel and Nancy Garmer on Open Access resources.