Tag: green open access

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Grad Center Faculty Workshop: Why & How to Submit to Academic Works

academic-works-oct-2014

Graduate Center faculty, did you know that the vast majority of journals allow authors to make their articles (either the pre-refereed version, the post-refereed version, or the publisher-branded PDF) freely available online?  However, the responsibility usually lies with you, the author, to do the online posting, and many journals specify that you can only post in a non-commercial institutional repository (as opposed to sites like Academia.edu).

Happily, the Graduate Center now has an institutional repository, Academic Works, ready to accept, store, and preserve your works — journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, data sets, etc.  (Read more about Academic Works.)  And the library is hosting a workshop next week to explain why and how to upload your works:

Faculty Workshop: How to Submit to Academic Works
(Open to GC and CUNY doctoral faculty and research assistants)
Tuesday, October 28, 2014, 1-2pm
Graduate Center Library, Room C196.03 (concourse level inside library)

Eventbrite - Faculty Workshop: How to Submit to Academic Works

We’ll cover the reasons why to submit in the workshop, but here’s a preview:

  • Posting your works online helps you find the widest possible readership.  (Most libraries can only afford to subscribe to a fraction of all scholarly journals.)
  • Articles that are freely available online are cited more by other articles – it’s called the “open access advantage” (read about it here).
  • Posting your works in the institutional repository makes them more findable by Google and Google Scholar.
  • Academic Works will send you monthly download statistics so you can see how often your works are being accessed and what searches led people to your works.
  • Unlike many disciplinary repositories, Academic Works accepts any kind of scholarly work – not just articles.
  • If your publisher requires an embargo period before your work can be made open access, Academic Works can count down the embargo for you and automatically open the work up when the embargo expires.
  • Institutional repositories last longer than personal websites (which are generally tied to your employment at CUNY or domain name registration payments)!

The actual act of submitting your work is simple and straightforward, but we’ll cover all the steps in the workshop too.

What about graduate students?  We welcome research assistants to attend this workshop with you or on your behalf.  However, the repository is not yet ready to accept articles, etc. by graduate students themselves.  (We’ll get there soon!)

Can’t make it but want to know more?  Contact Jill Cirasella, Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communication, jcirasella@gc.cuny.edu.

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Open Access Week @ GC: Authors’ Rights Workshop, 10/21

OAWeekEdit 580
Graphic is adapted from this image, © Dimitar Poposki, used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Next week (October 20-26, 2014) is Open Access Week, an annual global event promoting open access as a new norm in scholarship and research. At the Graduate Center, we’re celebrating Open Access Week with a workshop about understanding and preserving your rights as an author:

You Know What You Write, But Do You Know Your Rights?
Understanding and Protecting Your Rights As an Author
Tuesday, October 21st, 1-2pm
Graduate Center Library, Room C196.05 (concourse level inside library)

When you publish a journal article, you sign a copyright agreement. Do you know what you’re agreeing to when you sign it? Different journals have different policies:

  • Some journals require you to relinquish your copyright. (You then have to ask permission or even pay to share your article with students and colleagues!)
  • Some journals allow you to retain some rights (e.g., the right to post online).
  • Some journals leave copyright in your hands. (You simply give the journal a non-exclusive license to publish the article.)

How can you find out a journal’s policy? How can you negotiate your contract to make the most of your rights as a scholar, researcher, and author? Come learn how to preserve your rights to reproduce, distribute, and display the work you create.

Led by Jill Cirasella, Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communication at the Graduate Center. Open to students, faculty, staff, and anyone from the CUNY community who has questions about their rights as authors, open access publishing, or scholarly communication.

Eventbrite - Introduction to Author's Rights

Can’t make it? Want a preview of what’s covered? See the materials from the previous authors’ rights event.

 

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“For the Public Good”: A Public Institution and Its New Open Access Repository

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a column by Graduate Center Interim President Chase Robinson about the Graduate Center’s recent string of high-profile hires and overall success recruiting prominent and innovative faculty. One reason the Graduate Center is so appealing to potential hires, he says, is its “public character”:

“Hire after hire has responded to the mission that the Graduate Center volubly affirms: to create and disseminate knowledge, through research, teaching, and public events, for the public good.”

Knowledge that is created and disseminated for the public good of course does more good when it reaches more people. How can the Graduate Center make sure its research, teaching, and public events reach as broad a public as possible? The answer should be obvious to all regular readers of this blog: by making its research output, instructional materials, and public programming freely available online whenever possible!  

In other words, the Graduate Center can help its community fulfill its mission by promoting open access both in theory and in practice.

How can the GC do these two things? It can do the first by promoting conversation about scholarly communications and open access (which it does in many ways, including employing a scholarly communications librarian (that’s me!) and supporting JustPublics@365). And it can do the second by giving its faculty, staff, and students a place to easily and quickly make their works open access. And that brings me to…

Drumroll, please!

drumroll
Photo is © James Raynard,
used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.

The Graduate Center Library invites you to take a sneak peek at the Graduate Center’s brand new open access repository, Academic Works:

Snapshot of Graduate Center Academic Works
The Graduate Center’s new open access institutional repository: Academic Works

So far, Academic Works includes only a small handful of publications, but soon it will be teeming with articles, book chapters, conference papers, dissertations, master’s theses, and other scholarly and creative works by Graduate Center faculty, students, and staff. (Look for the dissertations and theses of February 2014 graduates to appear soon!) Curious what a thriving open access institutional repository looks like? Prowl around UMass Amherst’s ScholarWorks, University of California’s eScholarship, or Digital Commons @ University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

To clarify a commonly confused point: Only the GC community will be able to upload works to GC’s Academic Works. But everyone everywhere will be able to access and download them (those that aren’t embargoed, anyway).

We’re still finalizing the site and instructions, but if you’re a Graduate Center faculty member, you’re welcome to start submitting your scholarly and creative works to the repository! (We’re doing a phased launch, and for self-submissions we’re starting with faculty only. But it will be ready to accept GC student self-submissions in the near future. Dissertations and theses will go into the repository in batches after graduation, not via self-submission.) Contact Jill Cirasella, Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communication, to learn more.

To the broader CUNY community: The rest of CUNY will be launching an institutional repository in the near future. So if you’re at CUNY but not affiliated with the Graduate Center, you’ll have a repository of your own soon!