Scholarly Communication and You  

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge. ---From the Budapest Open Access Initiative

This page is designed to help scholars and researchers in the Bowdoin community understand the changes taking place in scholarly communication. You can play a vital role in this transformation of how scholarly research is being disseminated today. As an author, you have the ability to control the distribution of your publications and retain your author rights, but you must take an active role. The scholarly communication movement is dedicated to capitalizing on the use of the Internet to make research results and scholarly research broadly accessible. The information on this page will connect you to the resources you need to be a fully-informed participant in the new scholarly communication arena.

For an excellent overview of the issues involved in scholarly communication, please see Sherrie Bergman's article, The Scholarly Communication Movement: Highlights and Recent Developments [Collection Building 25, no. 4 (2006): 108-28]. Sherrie Bergman won the 2007 Outstanding Paper Award from the Emerald Literati Network in the Library Management category for this article. Click here to see the full announcement.

SPARC Open Access Newsletter is published monthly.  Click here to read the latest issue.

Click the following link to access previous issues: www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm

11 Provosts from research universities explain why they support Open Access: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/02/23/essay-open-access-scholarship 

The results of a recent SPARC supported study, "Economic and Social Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research Outputs" were made available on August 8, 2010. The findings were encouraging - " the US national benefits arising from the proposed FRPAA archiving mandate might be of the order of 5 times the costs."

• Retain your author rights when negotiating your publisher contracts (see Author Rights & Copyright tab).
• Consider publishing in open access journals (see Open Access tab).
• Ask your publisher to allow you to retain your right to deposit your work in an institutional or discipline-specific repository (see Institutional Repositories tab) or to place your publications on e-reserve.
• Comply with the NIH Public Access Policy. See the National Institutes of Health Public Access site for more information.

Contact 

Sue O'Dell, Science Librarian

ext. 3265

with any questions you may have.