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Open Access Scholarship

About Academic Works

CUNY Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing worldwide access to the research, scholarship and creative work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all.

Coordinated by the Office of Library Services at CUNY Central, CUNY Academic Works provides for the preservation and dissemination of a full range of scholarly and creative works, including faculty research such as articles and conference presentations; educational materials such as open textbooks; student works such as theses and dissertations; creative works such as poems and musical compositions; digitized archival documents from CUNY’s libraries and special collections. Included works are selected and deposited by the individual campus in consultation with the Office of Library Services.

Want to contribute to CUNY Academic Works? 

Current CUNY faculty, students, and staff are invited to submit works to the repository. Upon submission, a work will be:

  • More discoverable by search engines such as Google, Google Scholar, and Bing
  • Hosted on a secure server and given a stable URL to ensure long-term access
  • Freely accessible to the public, including researchers around the world who may have limited access to scholarly content

Any creator who submits work to CUNY Academic Works must either have copyright for the work or permission of the copyright holder to place the work in the repository. Many publishers allow authors to "self-archive" their works in an institutional repository. To find out the policy of a specific publisher or journal, check SHERPA/RoMEO, which provides easy-to-read summaries of self-archiving policies. Please note that SHERPA/RoMEO is not always updated, so double check your publishing contract to ensure you have the rights to upload your work to AW. Sometimes, if you cannot submit the published piece, you may be permitted to submit the accepted manuscript. 

Questions? Contact AcademicWorks@csi.cuny.edu