In accordance with our mission to make the world ever better, the University of Rochester (UR) commits to making knowledge generated at the UR as openly accessible as possible. Barriers to knowledge access are a significant source of academic inequity that the University seeks to remove.
As such, the University anticipates and encourages that all scholarly articles1 by UR affiliated authors will be freely accessible to all.
Such expectations may be achieved by sharing academic works or pre-publication versions of them through an open-access model or outlet, or deposition in an open-access repository or archive2.
Notes
1Scholarly articles describe the fruits of scholarly or research activity, including but not limited to: pre-prints, working papers, peer-reviewed articles, conference proceedings, dissertations, theses, or other formats relevant to specific disciplines. These guidelines do not apply to books, or musical scores and recordings, to articles whose publication in an open manner would result in conflict with other existing UR policies (e.g., intellectual property policy), to articles co-authored with other institutions who may not have such expectations, or to items subject to an embargo prohibiting open access (until the embargo is lifted).
2Open-access model, outlet, repository or archive refers to a publication system in which scholarly work is distributed digitally, free of charge, and free of most copyright restrictions. Examples include OA journals, pre-print servers, or institutional repositories. Details of such outlets, appropriate to academic disciplines, are available below.
Approved by the UR Faculty Senate on 04/15/2025.
