Support across the scholarly communications life cycle. Contact our Scholarly Communications team at scholcomm@library.rochester.edu for a consultation.

 

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Copyright and Author’s Rights

Confused by publishers’ copyright policies? Interested in retaining your rights and sharing your scholarship widely? We can clarify your available options and provide information to select the best fit for your publication.

Use our author addenda to negotiate additional rights with academic publishers, and check on open licensing options (Creative Commons) for your scholarship.

You should also explore our documentation on Fair Use and take advantage of copyright exceptions. Additionally, faculty can help your students understand their rights as authors and creators by discussing licensing options for their assignments and projects. 

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See also: Open Scholarship and Scholarly Sustainability

Open Scholarship

“Open” practices are a culture of sharing in a way that bypasses copyright barriers through the use of open licenses such as Creative Commons or GNU Licenses. These practices are an important part of the new scholarly communications landscape with its focus on equity, social engagement and the creation of a shared commons for human knowledge.

“Open scholarship” is an umbrella term used to represent open practices in academia, including open science, open access publishing, open source, open data, open education, open culture, etc.

Opening your research and teaching can increase your impact on academia. Talk to our librarians for examples of open tools and practices that match your interests and goals.

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See also: Copyright & Fair Use and Scholarly Sustainability

Integrating Digital Projects

Interested in developing a digital project for a course? Want to learn about digital platforms or methods that might increase your students’ digital literacy skills and ability to present their research in different formats?

We can help you explore potential options, provide samples of projects that others have done, discuss strategies for scoping and scaffolding the project, and work with you to make sure your students have the technical skills they need to complete the project.

Our team supports a range of digital tools and methods including geographic information systems, reflectance transformation imaging, 3D modeling, immersive technologies, extended reality, and more.

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See also: Choosing Digital Publishing Platforms

Citation Management

Academic citations give credit to the originator of ideas and allow readers to track down the original sources of information. Failure to cite sources properly constitutes plagiarism. Citation styles (APA, Chicago, MLA, etc.) differ by discipline and the preferences of their communities.

Reference managers are specialized applications that help you create your own database of articles, books, and other sources you might use in your writing; organize, read, and annotate those materials; and automatically generate in-text citations and bibliographies in your manuscripts.

The libraries carry manuals to all major citation styles and provides support for four major reference manager systems: Endnote, RefWorks, Mendeley and Zotero (as the recommended open-source software).

Citations to scholarly articles and books are included in several measurements of academic impact (e.g. Journal Impact Factor and h-Index).

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See also: Impact Metrics

Choosing Digital Publishing Platforms

Do you have an idea for a digital scholarship course project? Are interested in learning how to create your own public-facing scholarly work? If yes, we can help you explore potential platforms, learn about their strengths and limitations, and provide basic training on the technology. Applications available include WordPress, Scalar, Omeka, Mediawiki, and Drupal, to name a few.

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See also: Integrating Digital Projects

Keyword Optimization and Academic SEO

Ready to publish? Make sure your scholarly manuscript can be easily crawled and indexed by academic search engines and databases. This practice is referred to as academic search engine optimization (ASEO).

Since findability is key to the visibility of your research, you should select relevant keywords and synonyms to incorporate in your title and abstract, use identifiers and links whenever possible, and be consistent with the names of institutions and authors. Promote your research on the internet and social media to increase traffic to your content.

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See also: Impact Metrics and Scholarly Profile Management