Research Impact Challenge: 3. Preserve and Share your work with a Digital Repository

Part of having an impact as a researcher is ensuring you are sharing your research as broadly as possible. Publishing your research in a scholarly journal is critical first step, but most journals lock their content behind expensive paywalls, making your scholarship inaccessible to readers who are not otherwise affiliated with an institution wealthy enough to afford a journal subscription. This contributes to major global inequities of access and participation in systems of research, scholarship, and publishing.

To ensure that the broadest possible audience can access and read your work, you can share your work in an open access repository, regardless of where you publish. This type of sharing via a repository is often called self-archiving or Green Open Access (OA). 

Knowing your rights to share your scholarship

To share your work in a repository, you will need to check whether your publisher allows such sharing. Often, publishers will have you sign an agreement with them that limits authors from using or sharing their work in certain ways. You will have to check your sharing rights by reading the publication agreement sent to you by the publisher when your manuscript was accepted for publication or, if you don't have that agreement, by looking up your journal's sharing policy in the SHERPA/RoMEO database of journal/publisher policies.

When publishing a work, it is important to know which rights you would like to retain and how to retain those rights, so you have greater control over your scholarship, including:

• How you use your own published scholarship
• How you share and disseminate your scholarship beyond a journal article or book
• How others access, read, and use your scholarship

While publishers require some transfer of rights in order to disseminate your work, you are entitled to negotiate which rights you retain to use, share, and build upon your work (read more about author rights and scholarly publishing).

Scholarly Commons: CWRU's Open Access Repository

Scholarly Commons @ CWRU is the university's open access institutional repository for sharing the scholarly output of the university, and includes published scholarship produced by faculty, students, and staff. Sharing your work in Scholarly Commons means that anyone can read it, regardless of whether they subscribe to the scholarly journal you published in. It also means that the CWRU and the Kelvin Smith Library will work to ensure that your scholarship is preserved in the long term.

Anyone affiliated with CWRU can share their work in Scholarly Commons, and library staff can assist you in determining whether you have appropriate rights to do so. Note: The School of Law has their own Scholarly Commons repository to showcase Law faculty, staff, and student scholarship.

Wednesday Challenge: Share you work in an open access repository

Look up what rights you have as an author to share your work

1. Choose an article you have published in the past.
   • Is it an open access article published with an open license like a Creative Commons (CC) license? Authors of OA articles with CC licenses can freely share that article in the institutional repository.
   • Read your publication agreement (also called a "copyright transfer agreement") to see what rights to share your work you retain. Hint: Look for "Retained Rights" or "Author Rights" or  "Permitted Uses" in your agreement.
   • Don't have your agreement? Look up your journal in the SHERPA/RoMEO database of publisher policies on author rights. Need help? Check out their User Guide with video tutorials.
2. Consider the following questions:
   • Does your journal/publisher allow you as an author to share the article in a repository?
   • If yes, does your journal/publisher specify which version can be shared? For example, some publishers allow you to share the final published version, while other publishers only permit you to share the accepted manuscript (see Article Versions below). Your agreement should specify which version can be shared in a repository.
   • If yes, does your journal/publisher specify a duration of time after publication before the article can be shared in a repository (often called an "embargo" period)?
3. Still not sure? Contact digitalcommons@case.edu and a librarian can help you determine your sharing rights.

Share a version of your work in Scholarly Commons @ CWRU

1. To complete the challenge, after learning whether you retained the right to share your scholarship and determining which version you can share, go to Scholarly Common's self-submission form (select Student Scholarship if you are a student), enter your article's information, and upload a version of your article that your publication agreement permits.
2. Once your submission is reviewed by a KSL staff member, you will receive a permanent URL where your scholarship will be openly accessible in perpetuity!

Throughout the publishing process, your article will go through several editing processes that create different versions of your article. When you publish with a journal, you and your co-authors will often be allowed by your publisher to do certain things (like share an article in your institutional repository) only with certain versions of your article, so it is important to understand the different versions of your article.

• Submitted Version: the article manuscript that was submitted to the publisher that have not undergone peer review or other editing processes a.k.a. preprint, pre-refereed print, author’s original draft.
• Accepted Manuscript (AM): the article manuscript that incorporates all edits from the peer review process and has been accepted for publication, but without the final editorial typesetting by the publisher a.k.a. postprint, post-refereed print, author’s accepted manuscript (AAM)
• Published Version: the final version of the article manuscript with type-setting and formatting by the publisher .a.k.a. version of record (VoR), commercial version, publisher’s version. This is usually the final version that you'll see on the publisher/journal's website.

The repositories can be at institutional or central level, or can be specialized in a specific subject.

Central level repositories

These repositories are maintained by major funders.

Institutional repositories

Discovering each institutional repository is a difficult task. Instead, it is recommended the use of specialized search engines to discover repositories of interest.

Subject repositories

Check this list for more disciplinary repositories: