Digital technology is changing the way by which the academic community disseminates scholarship. New Internet based publishing models offer opportunities to increase access and enhance the availability of research results to scholars and the broader general public. Open Access publishing, Institutional Repositories, and a burgeoning list of peer-reviewed online journals are just a few examples of new publishing options available to scholars.

The Association of Research Libraries and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) have developed Create Change, an educational website that examines new modes of scholarly communication. This site and others like it can help academic authors follow the national conversation about opportunities to enhance scholarly communication in the digital networked environment.

Open Access Publishing

The aim of open access scholarly publishing is to make high quality, peer-reviewed scholarly content available freely on the web. A common misconception about open access as a publishing model is that anyone may post what he or she likes on the Internet. In fact, scholarly open access journals apply rigorous peer review to their content. The "open" refers to the free availability of research to the public, not to the removal of the refereeing process that has long been the basis of scholarly publishing. Open access is in every way compatible with rigorous peer review.

For more information on Open Access Publishing see:

• Peter Suber's excellent Open Access Overview;
• A growing directory of open access journals at Directory of Open Access Journals;
• ArXiv (Cornell) - The most extensive and longest-running open access repository provides open-access to e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology and Statistics;
• A growing directory of open access repositories can be found at the Directory of Open Access Repositories; and
• Open Courseware Initiative (MIT) - This site hosts freely-available educational materials which are specifically meant to be copied and used by faculty members for non-commercial purposes.

Creative Commons

Another strategy for retaining and assigning your copyright is to publish your work under a Creative Commons license. These licenses allow authors to retain the copyright to their work, and can be used to set the terms and conditions by which others may use the work. Some publishers are satisfied with the rights that authors license to them through Creative Commons and will agree to publish your work under some of the Creative Commons license options.

Additional Resources

Digital Scholarship & Publishing Center (North Carolina State University) - A wealth of information is available on this excellent website. Not only does it explain how open source publishing works, it also provides guidance for people who want to make their works freely available for all to use.