Open Access & Scholarly Publishing

The Boston College Libraries offer the ability to publish open access journals to academic departments, centers, and student groups. The Libraries provide setup and technical support using the open source Open Journal System software. Following are some of the journals we support. The full up to date list is available on our Open Access Journals page.

Boston College has joined the HathiTrust Digital Library, a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating to compile a massive digital library of published scholarship. The HathiTrust repository currently holds more than 9 million volumes, the full text of which is searchable online. More than 2 million of these volumes are in the public domain and openly accessible to all users, to read online or download.

Boston College is a member of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a collaborative global effort to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material. OCA content is hosted by the Internet Archive. Boston College has contributed nearly 6,000 titles to the OCA initiative.

In 2021, MIT Press established the Direct to Open (D2O) model as a sustainable framework that engages libraries as a way to circumvent the profit motive for academic publishing. As publishers continue to raise the prices of APCs, universities and libraries are trying to find more sustainable, cost efficient ways to access scholarly materials so that collection budgets are not consistently weighed down by yearly subscription, or one time purchases of articles.

The Directory of Open Access Journals is a repository of a wide variety of journals of all disciplines. Their aim is to continually support Open Access publication by indexing journals in their repositories. The Boston College Libraries supports this effort, as over the past twenty years the DOAJ has maintained a standard for peer-reviewed Open Access scholarship, making more accessible and readily available articles and journals that might otherwise be more difficult to find via simple Google or Google Scholar searches. 

BC Authors are Urged to Deposit in eScholarship@BC.

The eScholarship@BC Digital Repository is a central online system maintained by the Boston College University Libraries. Our goal is to showcase and preserve Boston College's scholarly output and to maximize research visibility and influence. eScholarship@BC encourages community contributors to archive and disseminate scholarly work, peer-reviewed publications, books, chapters, conference proceedings, and small data sets in an online open access environment.

Many publishers' policies allow self-archiving of work in a repository such as eScholarship. Faculty, students, staff are encouraged to increase the visibility of their work by retaining rights that allow open archiving of the scholarly materials they author. See Author Rights.

For help with submission of materials or for questions about journal copyright policies, contact your Subject Librarian or copyright-ggroup@bc.edu.

eTD@BC is an online system for submitting dissertations or theses at Boston College.

As part of your submission, you can choose to provide access to your work in eScholarship@BC. You can also choose to give users broader reuse rights for your work by applying a Creative Commons license.

For more information, see the eTD@BC guide at http://bc.edu/etd or contact the ETD administrator via email (etd-support@bc.edu) or phone (617) 552-1943.

As a Catholic, Jesuit University committed to social justice, Boston College has been a leader in support of Open Access initiatives.  Boston College is a signer of Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) and of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.
Mandates for making taxpayer-funded research available have been adopted by many Federal agencies.  Open Access increases the visibility and citability of articles, which is of high importance to all academic disciplines.
Relationships between Boston College Libraries and OA Publishers and consortia include: