What Can Faculty, Scientists, and Students Do?
In your role as a member of the scholarly communications process there are many steps you can take to be a proactive partner. Among them are:
- Be informed of your rights as an author. View the SPARC brochure on Author Rights. Use the WU Amendment to Publication Form to try to secure your copyrights.
- Review your publication agreement and retain rights to enhance the usability of your work.
- Submit your manuscript to journals that allow you to retain partial or full copyright of your work. Consult Sherpa-RoMEO to view what publishers allow or contact our Scholarly Communications Specialist. We will help you find publishers that allow for authors to retain some copyrights.
- Comply with the NIH Public Access Policy and deposit your NIH funded manuscript into PubMed Central.
- Give Becker Library your NIH funded manuscript for us to submit on your behalf in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy. We accept manuscripts from all Washington University authors.
- Support open access publishers and submit your manuscript to an open access journal. Consult the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) to find an open access journal.
- Invite the Becker Library’s Scholarly Communications Specialist to give a presentation to your department or program or for a personal consultation on any of the issues related to Scholarly Communications. Presentations can be scheduled at Becker Library or a location of your choice.
- Be aware of subscription costs of journals. Becker Library paid $22,813 in fees in 2007 for electronic access to The Journal of Comparative Neurology. Contact your Becker liaison to find out more about the cost of journals in your field or use Ulrich’s Periodical Directory or Ted Bergstrom’s Journal Pricing Page to find the subscription fees for journals.
- Deposit your work into Becker Library’s DSpace, Washington University’s institutional digital repository. DSpace will accept pre-prints, post-prints, posters, departmental newsletters, departmental histories, student papers, conference proceedings, and other works. Many publishers will allow for deposit of your works in institutional repositories. Consult Sherpa-RoMEO to view what publishers allow.
- Deposit your work to a subject based digital repository. Consult OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) to find an appropriate repository.
- Start an open access journal in your field. View the SPARC publications A Guide to Creating Community Controlled Science Journals and Gaining Independence: A Manual for Planning the Launch of a Nonprofit Electronic Publishing Venture.
- Use your influence as an editor in chief or member of an editorial board of a journal or as a reviewer to discuss copyright policies or journal pricing issues. What are the prices of your journals? What are the copyright policies? Do they allow the author to post a post or pre-print on an institutional web site? Use Ulrich’s Periodical Directory to find the subscription fees for journals. Consult Sherpa-RoMEO to view what publishers allow or Ted Bergstrom’s Journal Pricing Page to find the subscription fees for journals and related issues.
- Discuss the issues with your colleagues. Visit our Issues page to learn more about the issues.
- Send us your copyright questions. Send questions to our Scholarly Communications Specialist.
Contact our Scholarly Communications Specialist Cathy Sarli with any questions or feedback.
Last updated: February 29, 2008
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