Scholarly Communication & You:
Transforming How You Share and Publish Your Research and Retain Your Author Rights

author rights

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge. ---From the Budapest Open Access Initiative

Introduction

This page is designed to help scholars and researchers in the Bowdoin community understand the changes taking place in scholarly communication. You can play a vital role in this transformation of how scholarly research is being disseminated today. As an author, you have the ability to control the distribution of your publications and retain your author rights, but you must take an active role. The scholarly communication movement is dedicated to capitalizing on the use of the Internet to make research results and scholarly research broadly accessible. The information on this page will connect you to the resources you need to be a fully-informed participant in the new scholarly communication arena.

For an excellent overview of the issues involved in scholarly communication, please see Sherrie Bergman's article, The Scholarly Communication Movement: Highlights and Recent Developments [Collection Building 25, no. 4 (2006): 108-28]. Sherrie Bergman won the 2007 Outstanding Paper Award from the Emerald Literati Network in the Library Management category for this article. Click here to see the full announcement.

What exactly can you do?


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What is happening nationally?

There are several organizations leading the way to promote a new paradigm for the distribution of scholarly research and the rights of its authors, and which have been working hard on your behalf.You will use and benefit from many of their resources as you negotiate your publication contracts:

  • SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system.
  • Create Change is an educational initiative that examines new opportunities in scholarly communication, advocates changes that recognize the potential of the networked digital environment, and encourages active participation by scholars and researchers to guide the course of change. Create Change was developed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and is supported by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).
  • Budapest Open Access Initiative, brainchild of the Open Society Institute, is a worldwide initiative promoting open access to scholarly research.
  • Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences recently voted "to give the University a worldwide license to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in the articles, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit."

What is happening at Bowdoin College?

President Mills has joined other leaders in higher education in supporting the Federal Research Public Access Act. Information about the bill is available from the Alliance for Taxpayer's Access website.

In 2004/2005, the Library, in partnership with the Department of Chemistry, launched a lecture series on Scholarly Communications: New Directions for the 21st Century. The initial speaker, Clifford Lynch, CEO of the Coalition for Networked Information, presented the inaugural Harold and Iris Chandler Lecture on "Changing Practices of Scholarship and Implications for the Stewardship of Cultural and Scholarly Memory." Sherrie Bergman, Librarian of the College, presented the second lecture "It's Time to Create Change: Recent Scholarly Communication Developments." Vivien Siegel, then director of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), spoke on "Communicating Science in the 21st Century: Ensuring Access to Scientific Information." Last year Peter Suber, Research Scholar, Earlham University and SPARC Senior Researcher, spoke at Bowdoin on "What is Open Access to Science and Scholarship?"

In 2004, the Library and IT founded a campus-wide Digital Asset Management (DAM) group to identify common administrative and faculty needs related to the storage, description and presentation of collections of digital objects. The group has issued guidelines for managing still images that include standards for metadata and file management and offer workflow processing guidelines. DAM now is working on developing similar guidelines for managing digital video objects. The group also formed a digital copyright working group to draft a policy for the college that will be reviewed by administration and College counsel, and shared with the Bowdoin community.  DAM also is investigating software options for establishing a digital repository for Bowdoin.

The Library's scholarly communication series continues with a presentation by Sherrie Bergman and Sue O'Dell on April 1, 2008 with "Don't Give it All Away: an Author Rights Workshop". The workshop, offered to Bowdoin faculty and staff, will take place in Moulton Union at noon.

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Author Rights & Copyright

Author Rights: Policies and tools for authors

Before you sign your publisher's contract:

Copyright Policies

Open Access

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder. Peter Suber, A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access .

Open Access refers to the access given, via the internet, by authors of scientific and scholarly research publications to readers, without asking for any kind of royalty or payment. Users are permitted to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. Adapted from the Budapest Open Access Initiative .

  • Open Access benefits faculty by allowing a larger audience for their research and providing them with greater control over their work.
  • OA benefits students by providing access to broader spectrum of published scholarship than would be available in traditional publishing.
  • The benefits for libraries include assurance that the work created by the faculty of the institution will not have to be bought back from the publisher, and the ability to provide access to articles from journals to which they do not subscribe.

Degrees or varieties of OA - Some use a color code to classify journals: gold (provides OA to its research articles, without delay), green (permits postprint archiving by authors), pale green (permits, i.e. doesn't oppose, preprint archiving by authors), gray (none of the above)

Directory of Open Access Journals - A free listing of over 2800 free, full text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals.


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Institutional Repositories

An institutional repository is a “digital collection capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community” SPARC, Self Archiving and Institutional Repositories.

The Library and IT are exploring various platforms for mounting an institutional repository at Bowdoin.

Keeping Current

To keep abreast of the rapid legal and legislative developments in scholarly communication, let experts keep up for you. Link to websites or blogs such as Peter Suber's newsletter, SPARC Open Access Newsletter & Forum, or his Open Access News blog.

Whom do I contact for more information?

Contact , (x3265), Science Librarian, or , (x3281), Librarian, with any questions you may have.

Resources and Further Readings

Bergman, S.S. (2006). The Scholarly Communication Movement: Highlights and Recent Developments. Collection Building 25, 108-128. Winner of the 2007 Outstanding Paper Award from the Emerald Literati Network in the Library Management category.

Know Your Rights: Who Really Owns Your Scholarly Works

Suber, Peter (2007). Open Access Overview: Focusing on open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints. Last revised June 19, 2007. Accessed Oct. 3, 2007.

What are other libraries doing about issues of scholarly communication?

Organizations offering information and support


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Glossary

Institutional Repository : a “digital collection capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community.” SPARC, Self Archiving and Institutional Repositories

Open Access: "Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder." Peter Suber, A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access.

With open access publications, users are permitted to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. Adapted from Budapest Open Access Initiative . Degrees or varieties of OA: Some use a color code to classify journals: gold (provides OA to its research articles, without delay), green (permits postprint archiving by authors), pale green (permits, i.e. doesn't oppose, preprint archiving by authors), gray (none of the above)

Scholarly Communication " is the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs." Association of College and Research Libraries, Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication.

However, scholarly communication has evolved to illustrate the breakdown of the process of traditional scholarly publication; that is, as a means to disseminate research results, the present system of scholarly communication can no longer meet the needs of the scholarly community at large. It includes such issues as open access, copyright, institutional repositories, legislation regarding tax funded research, and access to articles for electronic reserve. ACRL, Scholarly Communication Toolkit.

SHERPA : Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access - is attempting to support the development of institutional repositories, and also offers guidance for authors and information on open access.

SHERPA RoMEO : One of SHERPA's projects. Use this site to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement.

SPARC : Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition - an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system.