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5-Day Impact Challenge

A guide on how to increase your scholarly impact in just 5 days!

Open Access at Duquesne

Join other faculty and graduate students at Duquesne in making your work more available to the world and more discoverable by search platforms such as Google/Google Scholars by making your work available Open Access!

Here are some examples of members of the Duquesne community already involved in Open Access publishing.

Duquesne's institutional repository

 

About the repository

Duquesne's institutional repository is funded jointly by the Gumberg Library and the Duquesne Kline Law Library. The institutional repository allows for the collection and preservation of Duquesne’s intellectual output and provides a platform for showcasing and increasing the discoverability of the university’s scholarly and creative works. So, Digital Commons will complement access granted by subscription databases by helping your work float to the top of search results in Google/Google Scholar (and other popular search engines). As mentioned yesterday, as a bonus, Digital Commons will also provide information about who's reading your work.

Many other universities have institutional repository platforms where they collect scholarship authored by faculty was well as datasets, archival materials, institutionally-administered journals, and student scholarship such as theses and dissertations. Odds are you've encountered content hosted on an institutional repository at some point during your research!

 

Benefits

  • Free! Self-archiving is a popular option for those who don’t want to pay OA fees but still want to make their work OA. 
  • Discoverable in Google/Google Scholar. Works in Duquesne's institutional repository platform will show up in Google/Google Scholar results.
  • University-affiliated. Your publication will be made available on a Duquesne-branded site, clearly indicating that the work originated in a higher education context.
  • Facilitated submission. As the Faculty Scholarship collection in Duquesne's institutional repository is relatively new, the Digital Scholarship Librarian is providing full service for researching rights (i.e. the version of your article that you are able to post) and uploading submissions.

 

Drawbacks

  • Publisher-mandated embargo periods. Often, publisher restrictions mean researchers have to wait a year or longer to make their work available via self-archiving, leading to major delays in the dissemination of their work. Again, SHERPA/RoMEO is a great tool for determining what your journal’s embargo policies are. Work can be submitted to Duquesne's institutional repository under a limited embargo to help you comply with your publisher's restrictions.

 

Ready to submit your work to the institutional repository? Enter your name and email and upload a copy of your CV using the form below!


Open access funds & fee waivers

If you decide to publish in an OA or hybrid OA journal but need some help meeting the publication fees, you've got several options.

 

Duquesne's Subventions & Page Charges Policy

The Office of the Provost provides matching support to tenure-track and tenured faculty whose manuscripts have been accepted for publication on the condition that they provide an author subvention. This policy can also be applied to OA fees. Faculty interested in matching support should consult their department chairs and deans for more information.

 

Grant budgets

If you're the PI on a grant, you can often write in expected publication fees into your budget. (Or if you're working with a forward-thinking PI, you might ask them to foot the bill out of their grant funds.) Given that more and more funding agencies require public access to the research they fund, they're becoming increasingly amenable to covering such costs.

 

Fee waivers

Some OA journals will waive their publication fees for authors who hail from low-income countries or who can document financial hardship. Check with your publisher as to whether such waivers are available, and what the qualifications are for applying.


Find OA journals in which to publish

Many different resources exist to help guide you in finding different OA journals. One place to start your hunt is the Directory of Open Access Journals’ listings. This list was curated with quality in mind. In selecting a journal to publish in, you'll want to consider three questions:

  • How does this journal rank in comparison to other journals?
  • What are the acceptance rates of this journal?
  • What is the availability of this journal?