Take Action

We are committed to making access to research more sustainable, affordable, transparent, and open. Here are actions that you can take as authors, researchers and members of the scholarly community to help achieve that goal.

Research and Authorship

Retain your copyright

In scholarly publishing, copyright is often transferred from the researcher to the publisher. However, you can seek to retain their copyright through negotiations with publishers or through open access publishing.

The SPARC Author Addendum offers a template to use to negotiate author rights.

Publishing research with Creative Commons Licenses also allows for you to retain your rights. These licenses are used in open access publications. Under a Creative Commons License, authors retain their copyright, but give usage permissions. To identify open access journals available in your field, please visit the Directory of Open Access Journals or contact your liaison librarian at Academic Library Services or Laupus Library. Publishers allowing a Creative Commons License on scholarly work will often request permission for first distribution rights.

Some open access journals request an article processing charge. ECU Libraries’ Open Access Publishing Support Fund is available to help offset some of the publishing costs.

More information about open access publishing support is available under Open Access Publishing Support.

Share your work

In addition to publishing open access articles, you can make your work available in institutional or subject repositories. This allows other researchers to access your work without a paywall. Additionally, repositories provide an archived version of your work.

ECU has an institutional repository, The ScholarShip, available for you to add your scholarly work, including articles, conference presentations, and research posters.

ECU also offers a data repository, DataVerse, to share and archive your datasets. This is particularly helpful for final datasets that accompany published works. To deposit work, please contact Kerry Sewell (Laupus Library) or Academic Library Services Scholarly Communication.

Not all journals allow authors to share a version of their published manuscript. It is therefore important to check on your rights to share your article prior to depositing it in The ScholarShip or any other scholarly repository. You can refer to your signed publishing agreement with the publisher. One way to check on your ability to share your published work is to search for the journal you published your article within the Sherpa/Romeo website—this resource provides information about journal policies for self-archiving of research manuscripts. Additionally, you can review copyright policies before publication and negotiate your author rights using the SPARC Author Addendum.

Academic Library Services offers Journal Hosting Services with Open Journal Systems for you to host open access e-journals. You can build an e-journal or migrate an existing journal to ECU with support provided by Academic Library Services. For details, please contact William Joseph Thomas (Academic Library Services).

Access research

ECU Libraries are committed to providing access to resources needed for your research and teaching. Through Summon and the E-Resources Portal, we provide access to more than 100,000 electronic journals. Materials not available in our collection can be requested through Interlibrary Loan.

In some cases, open access versions of articles you need may be available through other means. To find any existing open access versions of articles, you can install free tools, like UnPaywall, to your browser. These tools search for version of the article that is available in an institutional repository or other open databases.

You can also search for preprint versions of articles may be available in databases like OSF Preprints or arXiv. A preprint is an article that is in its pre-publication stage, meaning that it has not undergone peer review. By sharing preprints, researchers can share their researcher quickly and gather feedback on it. When reading preprints, it is important to remember that no peer review has occurred—it is therefore critical to examine the methods used for the research to be sure that the research was rigorous.

You can reach out to the authors to request a copy of the article.

Teaching

Provide articles for students through Canvas

The Libraries have previously recommended that instructors use “permalinks” to articles included in Canvas (and previously Blackboard) courses. This is still best practice for articles to which the Libraries have an online subscription. However, for articles that you legally acquire through other means, please upload a copy of the PDF to Canvas.

Encourage free and immediate access to dissertations and theses

Encourage your students and advisees to share their research. Embargoes and restricted access settings delay the visibility and use of student research

Student Learning and Research

Accessing articles

ECU Libraries are committed to providing access to resources needed for your education and research. Materials not available in our collection can be requested through Interlibrary Loan.

In some cases when the libraries do not have access to a journal article you need, an open access version of the article may be available. To find any existing open access versions of articles, you can install free tools, like UnPaywall, to your browser. These tools search for the free version of the article that is available in an institutional repository or other open databases. Alternatively, Google Scholar may also provide links to existing free versions of the article.

Make dissertations and theses immediately available through The ScholarShip

Research is meant to be shared. Embargoes on dissertations and theses delay access to your research. We understand that students sometimes have concerns that making their dissertation or thesis immediately available will greatly reduce the chance that a publisher will publish an article-length version of the research. However, the process of shortening the research to article length, along with the process of peer review, will often result in an article that is vastly different from the thesis/dissertation. For this reason, most publishers do not oppose the open and immediate availability of theses and dissertations.