Our faculty senate passed, unanimously, an open access policy. I chaired the committee that drafted the policy. It’s a big relief to have it done, and with so much support from across the college. We’ve adopted the consortium soulution, the SUNY Open Access Repository (SOAR), and migrated about three hundred items from an older repository. Next we’re working with the provost’s office to harvest data from faculty’s annual activity reports.
Otherwise, the semester is winding down. Students left the dorms the week before last, as COVID-19 cases were rising but just before we had enough cases to trigger an automatic closure. This was the last week of classes; next week is finals. So it’s the usual round of reference questions, especially citation questions. Volume is down from the pre-pandemic era. I suspect faculty are assigning much less research this semester, or students are doing everything via Google.
