Why and How to Submit to Academic Works

Jill Cirasellajcirasella@gc.cuny.edu

Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communication

http://works.gc.cuny.edu

What Is Academic Works?

• Graduate Center Academic Works is the GC’s new open access institutional repository.

• It is a place to submit, store, and share your scholarly and creative works: journal articles, book contributions, conference papers and posters, slideshows, data sets, images, etc.

• Only the GC community can upload works.

• Everyone everywhere can access and download them.

Why Submit Your Work?

• It’s your work — don’t let publishers control it!

• Making your work open access (i.e., freely available online) helps you find the widest possible audience.

• Posting works to Academic Works makes them more findable by Google and Google Scholar.

• Many grant agencies require you to make your grant-funded work open access.

• Institutional repositories last longer than personal websites.

Why Submit Your Work?

• “Open Access Advantage”: Articles that are freely available online are cited more by other articles.*

* They’re also mentioned more in news, blogs, tweets, etc.

Graph by Gargouri Y, Hajjem C, Larivière V, Gingras Y, et al.http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0013636

Why Submit Your Work?

• Academic Works sends you monthly download statistics.

• Unlike many disciplinary repositories, Academic Works accepts any kind of scholarly/creative work — not just articles.

• It also accepts any kind of file: PDF, XLS, CSV, JPG, etc.

• Academic Works puts a GC-branded cover page on all PDFs, helping people who find your work on Google understand what they’re looking at and who you are.

• If your publisher requires an embargo period, Academic Works can count down the embargo for you and automatically open the work up when the embargo expires.

Why Submit Your Work?

• Help make access to information and education more equal.

• Let taxpayers access the research they fund.

• Help CUNY live up to its mission to educate the public affordably.

• The publisher didn’t pay you but charges readers and libraries, often dearly. Do you want to let the publisher deny readers access to work you gave them for free? Do you want to let them profit off it?

Can You Submit Your Work? Ugh…

Can You Submit Your Work? Easier!

SHERPA/RoMEOhttp://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

Search by journal/publisher to learnits copyright and self-archiving policies

Very Good...

Quite Good...

Not Great...

Very Bad...

Prevalence of Permission?

Among Publishers

SHERPA/RoMEO covers 1696 publishers as of October 2014.74% allow some form of self-archiving.

For more information:http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/statistics.php

Prevalence of Permission?

Among Journals

Of the 18,000+ journals covered by SHERPA/RoMEO in Nov. 2011:

• 87% allow immediate self-archiving of some version of article

• 60% allow immediate self-archiving of post-refereed version

• 16% allow immediate self-archiving of published PDF• Allowing for embargoes (usually 6 to 24 months), 94%

allow self-archiving of post-refereed versions

For more information:http://romeo.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2011/11/24/

Can I Negotiate My Contract?

Sometimes.

Your best shot is the Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine:

http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/

Can I Ask After the Fact?

Yes! (Ask me for a sample!)

Dear Publisher,  I am writing to ask permission to mount a copy of an article of mine, which was published in one of your journals, in the CUNY Graduate Center’s research repository, Academic Works…  If possible, I would like post the the final, journal-braded PDF version. The PDF version is preferable to my manuscript version because it maintains consistency in appearance of the article wherever it is read and more closely associates the article with the journal…

How to Submit Your Work?

See handout…

Thank you!

Questions?

Jill Cirasellajcirasella@gc.cuny.edu