Kelvin Smith Library
Repositories are document servers that allow open sharing of different scholarly works. Repositories provide readers with free access to scholarly information and provide authors with greater visibility and impact. Scholarly Commons @ CWRU is the OA repository for sharing the scholarship of CWRU faculty, staff, researchers, and students.
*Don't have a work that you are ready to share yet? Complete this week's action by instead visiting Scholarly Commons and accessing a work posted by CWRU author.
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 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. This type of sharing via a repository is often called self-archiving or Green Open Access (OA).
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:
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 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.
When I checked shareyourpaper.org, it said that I could share the Accepted Manuscript. What is this?
Throughout the publishing process, your article will go through several editing processes that create different versions of your article. 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.
Where can I find the Accepted Manuscript version of my work?
Search your email, computer hard drive, and cloud storage
Contact the corresponding author who may have received this version in the article acceptance email or other co-authors
Log into the journal's author portal and retrieve a copy of the accepted version or AAM (sometimes in sections like Your Research, Submitted Manuscripts, Manuscript Decisions, etc.)
Contact the journal by email and ask for a copy of the accepted version of your article
When I checked shareyourpaper.org, it said that I could share my work after an embargo period. Does the repository allow me to set an embargo period?
Yes, you can set an embargo date in the system using the Embargo Date field in the submission form. The system will not publicly share your work until that date.
The repositories can be at institutional or central level, or can be specialized in a specific subject.
These repositories are maintained by major funders.
Discovering each institutional repository is a difficult task. Instead, it is recommended the use of specialized search engines to discover repositories of interest.
Check this list for more disciplinary repositories: