Unlocking scholarly publishing: ask your Scholarly Communication Librarian
Welcome to "Unlocking scholarly publishing" hosted by me, Melissa Cantrell, Scholarly Communication Librarian at the University Libraries. In this regular feature, I’ll dive into your questions about scholarly publishing, covering everything from open access (OA) and authors' rights to scholarly impact and the latest trends shaking up scholarly communication.
Got a question? Ask me. I am here to help you navigate the ever-evolving landscape of scholarly publishing!
Why are the Libraries invested in transforming scholarly publishing toward OA?
Scholarly publishing, for lack of a better word, is wild. Researchers put in immense effort to create their research, often for free, and in many cases, hand it over to commercial publishers who then sell it back to universities at staggering profits. By publishing OA, authors typically retain more rights over their work and the public can also access it at no cost.
As a global leader in groundbreaking and impactful research, it’s a high priority for researchers at CU Boulder to be able to disseminate their work as widely as possible and to demonstrate impact both within their fields and in the broader community. Through our OA initiatives, the University Libraries support CU Boulder’s goal of positively impacting humanity by making our innovative research accessible across the world.
How does our investment in open access benefit researchers on campus?
Let’s face it—the publication process can be complicated and frustrating. Our investments reduce barriers for authors and help streamline the process of sharing your scholarship. We provide workshops, consultations and infrastructure to support CU Boulder researchers in identifying OA publication outputs, leveraging authors’ rights, and demonstrating the impact of their work. Our OA investments help researchers to retain more rights over their scholarship and ensure its availability to the public and the global community of researchers.
How can you take advantage of these benefits?
Publishing in a venue covered by one of our established agreements can fully cover or reduce costs which may be associated with OA.
If your journal is not currently covered under an agreement but is fully OA, we can offset costs through our general Open Access Fund.
You can apply for up to $15K to make your monograph OA through our Open Monograph Fund.
You can also make a variety of research outputs, including articles and data, publicly accessible via CU Scholar, our institutional repository. This can expand the reach of your work and complies with grant requirements for public access.
Have a suggestion for OA support or an agreement with a publisher you’d like to see? We’d like to hear from you!