The Washington University Open Access Resolution, passed in 2011, encourages faculty to make its scholarship and creative works freely and easily available to the world community. Faculty members are encouraged to seek venues for their works that share this ideal.
What can authors do?
- Practice Open Science principles to promote transparent and accessible knowledge.[i]
- Publish a journal article under an Open Access license.
- Archive manuscript versions of journal articles to a repository such as DigitalCommons@Becker or PubMed Central (PMC).
- Publish a preprint and post to a repository such as MedRxiv.
- Post manuscript versions of journal articles on a laboratory website.
- Send journal articles to individuals for educational and research purposes under Fair Use principles.
- Use multiple avenues of communicating research such as social media and blog posts.
- Utilize plain language summaries in scholarly works and other materials.
- Share and deposit research data.
- Respect inclusion in scientific dissemination by creating messages that reflect and respect diversity regarding factors like gender, demography, and ability.[ii]
- Collaborate with other researchers using an open platform such as the Open Science Framework to share findings and data.
- Publish Open Education Resources (OER) in support of open education.
To advance the goals of the Resolution, Becker Medical Library has invested in programs and initiatives to help faculty and authors make works more accessible.
How can the library help?
- Support for authors with Data Sharing and Management
- An institutional repository for the School of Medicine DigitalCommons@Becker, which contains scholarly works and other materials that are freely accessible to the world.
- Memberships with publishers that allow for discounted Article Processing Charges (APCs) for Open Access works published by WUSTL Corresponding authors. See: Membership List.
- Offering a Health Literacy and Plain Language (HLPL) Review Service to revise and tailor written materials to meet the average adult’s health literacy needs.
- Support for authors funded by funding agencies that have public access policies such as NIH, other federal funding agencies and private funders.
- Provide copyright support and publishing options for faculty and authors.
- Identify preprint repositories to publish a preprint.
- Membership with the Open Science Framework (OSF) that offers a free open platform for collaboration and sharing research.
- Consortia community membership with the Open Textbook Network (OTN) that contains open textbooks that are funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed.
Please contact Cathy Sarli at sarlic@wustl.edu with any questions.
Sources
[i] Open Science. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science
[ii] Ross-Hellauer T, Tennant JP, Banelytė V, Gorogh E, Luzi D, Kraker P, et al. (2020) Ten simple rules for innovative dissemination of research. PLoS Comput Biol 16(4): e1007704. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007704