Open access journals are more discoverable by scholars and the public than their non-OA counterparts. This increases the likelihood that others will find the material, thus aiding in the wider dissemination of the work and the potential impact of the article.
The OA advantage is real, independent, and causal, but skewed. Its size is correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations).
Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research PLoS One (2010).
Produced by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries and McGill University Library.
Sherpa Romeo is a database of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement. You can search the database by journal title, ISSN, or by publisher to determine what a publisher will allow you to archive in an institutional repository or on a personal website under their standard agreement.
Sherpa Juliet is a similar database, focused on funders rather than publishers. You can search the database to find out funders' conditions for open access, publication, and data archiving.
DigitalCommons@Linfield uses the terms originally set forth by the VERSIONS Project at the London School of Economics to identify article versions in the repository. You might want to use these terms when you save your article versions, especially the accepted version, so you can deposit the version for which you have permission in the repository.
Suggested version names for journal articles.
Helpful hints on how to track versions:
Explore the VERSIONS Toolkit for authors, researchers, and repository staff.
How can I find others in my field who are publishing open access?
Ask around at your next conference and look for repository links in their slides.
Search for colleagues on their own institutional repositories. It is typical to be able to search by author or department.
Use Google Scholar. By doing a keyword search, you can identify relevant papers or people and look for links to repositories or personal webpages to the right of each result, or select the 'all (number) versions' link next to the article. By scanning the locations you can locate copies in repositories and on personal web pages.
Signing the publisher's copyright transfer agreement may limit how you want to share your scholarship.
Already 90% of journals will allow authors to self-archive in some way. If you want to retain more or specific rights, try The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine. This tool will help you generate a PDF form you can attach to a journal publisher's copyright agreement as a way to ensure you retain the rights you need to make your article open access.
Book publishing has its own set of terms to navigate. The Authors Alliance provides a primer on this subject: Understanding and Negotiating Book Publishing Contracts.
Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. CC provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.
Why Should I Share My Research Data?
Data sharing achieves many important goals for the scientific community, such as
How do I share my data?
What forms can data take? Here are a few examples, including common file formats:
Copyright and data sharing:
Data cannot be licensed, but Creative Commons CC0 (CC Zero) can be used to indicate that it is the public domain. CC0 is "a universal public domain dedication that may be used by anyone wishing to permanently surrender the copyright and database rights (where they exist) they may have in a work, thereby placing it as nearly as possible into the public domain."