SUNY Open Access Repository Launch: First steps

Begin outreach/education of Downstate staff, faculty and students

Next steps to begin building awareness of SOAR and it's capabilites and advantages for raising the profile of the institution and researchers.

• Targeted email to Deans, department heads, program and research leads. (Help identifying?)
• Announce to the scholarly activities working group.
• Announcement through Downstate department of communication to the campus.
• Google scholar alert set up for recent publications from Downstate identify eligible works (journal articles only initially).
• Eligibility of alert items determined by DOI tool or SHERPA/ROMEO
• Solicitation email sent to researcher. Email tailored to either Open Access journal or traditional publication.

We are in discussions with one of our vendors, Elsevier, to put together a presentation on the scholarly publishing cycle (e.g. submission to publication to deposit in the repository) that we hope to have ready in the fall. 

This will begin the process of populating Downstate's area of SOAR in a small way. I will be able to see the failure points and adapt and adjust the process to ease submissions for everyone. 

Hopefully, as awareness is built and Downstate researchers start seeing their colleague's work collected together, a sense of collegiality and friendly competition will be fostered to start building this collection as a representation of Downstate's research output.

Buy-in and support from adminstration is paramount. 

Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you may have:

Gregg Headrick

gregg.headrick@downstate.edu