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Sociology

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Open Access Resources

Starting Point for Sociology and Anthropology Portal

What is OA?

"Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder."

From Peter Suber's Very brief introduction to Open Access.

Learn more : Open Access and Scholarly Publishing

eScholarship@BC

BC Authors are Urged to Deposit in eScholarship@BC

The eScholarship@BC Digital Repository is a central online system whose goal is to showcase and preserve Boston College's scholarly output. There is strong commitment to make as much as possible of the scholarship produced by the Boston College community openly accessible. Consequently, faculty, students, staff are encouraged to retain their ownership of the scholarly materials they author. See Author Rights.

eScholarship@BC maximizes research visibility, influence, and benefit by encouraging Boston College authors to archive and distribute online both unpublished work and peer-reviewed publications in an Open Access environment.

OA and the Social Sciences


This box contains links to social science repositories and interdisciplinary repositories with substantial social science material.  It is by no means exhaustive and is intended to provide a sense of the range of types of resources available.

HathiTrust

HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. HathiTrust began in 2008 as a collaboration of the thirteen universities.  There are now more than fifty partners in HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide. Boston College recently joined HathiTrust.

The Hathitrust collection includes nearly 10,000,000 digitized items, and over 2,000,000 are in the public domain, available to anyone with an internet connection.

The initial focus of the partnership has been on preserving and providing access to digitized book and journal content from the partner library collections. This includes both in copyright and public domain materials digitized by Google, the Internet Archive, and Microsoft, as well as through in-house initiatives.

Boston College recently signed on as a Hathitrust member.

DPLA Initiative

The DPLA (Digital Public Library of America) Steering Committee is leading the first concrete steps toward the realization of a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all. This impact-oriented research effort unites leaders from all types of libraries, museums, and archives with educators, industry, and government to define the vision for a digital library in service of the American public. Initial funding is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The DPLA Secretariat is located at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; the Steering Committee comprises library and foundation leaders across the nation.