Scholarly Communication: Maximize Research Impact

Information on: author's rights and publishing models for scholarly works; open access to scholarly works through the Marquette institutional repository, ePublications@Marquette

Maximize Impact of Research

1. Submit research articles to OA journals when there are appropriate OA journals in your field.

2. Deposit preprints in an open-access, OAI-compliant archive.

  • The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. OAI has its roots in the open access and institutional repository movements. The work of OAI has expanded to promote broad access to digital resources for eScholarship, eLearning, and eScience.

3. Deposit postprints in an open-access repository such as Marquette University's institutional repository, ePublications@Marquette, or an appropriate discipline specific repository which may be found using the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

  • The postprint is the version accepted by the peer-review process of a journal, often after some revision.

4. Deposit data files in an OA archive along with the articles built on them. When possible, link to the data files from the articles so that readers can find it.

Participate in the Conversation

1. Work with your professional societies to make sure they understand OA. Persuade the organization to make its own journals OA, endorse OA for other journals in the field, and support OA eprint archiving by all scholars in the field.

2. Volunteer to serve on your university's committee to evaluate faculty for promotion and tenure. Make sure the committee is using criteria that, at the very least, do not penalize faculty for publishing in peer-reviewed OA journals.

At best, adjust the criteria to give faculty an incentive to provide OA to their peer-reviewed research articles and preprints, either through OA journals or OA archives.

3. Understand how other learned societies support OA.

4. If you are an editor of a toll-access journal, then start an in-house discussion about converting to OA, experimenting with OA, letting authors retain copyright, abolishing the Ingelfinger rule, or declaring independence.

5. Write opinion pieces (articles, journal editorials, newspapers op-eds, letters to the editor, discussion forum postings) advancing the cause of OA.

6. Educate yourself and the next generation of scientists and scholars about OA.