Faculty Services: Scholarly Communication and Open Access:
What You Can Do

What Faculties are Doing

Faculty at other universities are responding to the crisis in scholarly communication. In February 2008, the faculty of Harvard University voted to make the entire research output of the University available via open access. Faculty are creating open access journals as alternatives to expensive commercial titles, and lobbying for expanding author rights at other journals and within their scholarly societies. And they are pooling their resources to create institutional support, such as the University of California's Office of Scholarly Communication.

Assert Your Rights as Authors and Teachers

Negotiate with publishers to retain rights to distribute your own intellectual property. Resources for Authors from SPARC provides a state-of-the-art review of the issues and methods for doing this. Tools such as the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine can suggest clauses that you can add to your author agreements with publishers that will allow your work to be archived in Open Access repositories, and give you back control of the use of your own work in research and teaching.

Use the copyrighted works of others in your teaching with support from Know Your Copyrights - What You Can Do [PDF] and Using Copyrighted Works in Your Teaching: Questions Faculty and Teaching Assistants Need to Ask Themselves Frequently, both from the Association of Research Libraries.

Publish Your Research with Us

In order for your work to be cited, it should be permanently available, freely accessible, and securely archived. RUcore, the Rutgers Community Repository, provides this functionality and allows the easy deposit of material through a simple faculty submission form. In addition to permanent open access, RUcore provides durable links to your material and ensures that it is discoverable via Google and other search engines. Having your material in an institutional repository means that you will never have to worry about publishers changing policies as journal titles change hands, or about the long-term viability of external clearinghouses. Moving more scholarly communication to an open access environment will reduce these concerns for all scholars.