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Scholarly Communications at UO

It's commonplace to describe academia as "teaching and research."  Both are intimately tied to communications, and in particular to the patterns of scholarly communications that have developed over the past century or more.  We're all familiar with the ecology of faculty authors producing research articles, peer-reviewed journals vetting the scholarship and distributing it, and libraries organizing, archiving, and making it available to other scholars and students as the foundation on which new knowledge is built.

This website is focused on University of Oregon initiatives in the area of scholarly communications, and specifically on services in support of UO authors and editors. Find information on how to:

Hoe's one-cylinder printing press (source: Wikimedia)

[Note: this page is in progress. Additional material will be added soon]

The NIH Public Access Policy

All NIH-funded researchers are required by federal law to deposit a copy of their NIH-derived publications in PubMed Central and to cite the PubMed Central PMCID as part of grant reports and future grant submissions.

"The Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research." Important secondary goals:

  • For patient advocates: "If my tax dollars pay for information that affects my health, I have the right to read that information"
  • For libraries: develop open-access alternatives to commercial publishing
  • For authors: increase the impact of scholarly work

For all peer-reviewed publications arising from NIH grants, authors must

  1. Secure permission from their publishers to allow online archiving in PubMed Central
  2. Deposit author's final version in PubMed Central
  3. Cite the PMCID in future grant submissions, etc.

For more details, see the NIH FAQ at http://publicaccess.nih.gov

If you are a UO author of an NIH-funded paper and would like assistance complying with the Public Access Policy, contact your library subject specialist or JQ Johnson (6-1746).

See also:

Copyright Transfer Agreements

Most academic journals require that authors transfer copyright ownership to the publisher as a condition of publication. Authors are asked to sign the agreement after their article is accepted. After the copyright transfer, the publisher is essentially the legal author of the work, and has full control over its further use (making copies, creating derivative works, quoting from it, etc.).

A journal copyright transfer typically cannot abrogate any previous licenses an author has made, and may include a new license that allows the original author a few rights to use the work. However, most UO authors will find that they have given up more rights than they expect or wish to. It's possible to negotiate the terms of the publishing contract.

The first step is to know what rights you really want to retain. For example, you probably want to be able to use your own work in your teaching, to distribute copies of the work to colleagues, to reuse figures or quote from it in future works, and to make a version of your work publicly accessible, perhaps in the UO's Scholars' Bank or a disciplinary repository like arXiv. If your work is grant-funded, then the funding agency may make additional requirements that in turn imply that you need to retain sufficient legal rights to comply.

The second step is to make a counter-offer to the publisher rather than simply signing the copyright transfer agreement.  You'll typically do so by including an author's addendum in your transfer agreement. If the publisher responds by rejecting the addendum, you can negotiate, and in a few cases where the stakes are high may even want to obtain legal advice.

For more detail on how to proceed, see:

Avoiding plagiarism

Check your (or a student's or collaborator's) work for accidental plagiarism. Use the Blackboard SafeAssign module.

Quoting copyrighted works

When you use someone else's work in your own publications, you are obligated by both copyright law and academic integrity.  Academic integrity demands proper attribution and citation, plus an effort not to distort the intent by quoting out of context.  Copyright law demands more.  If you are quoting a small amount of text, then it is likely "fair use" and legal, but if you are copying a large amount of text you will need to secure permission from the copyright owner (sometimes the person listed as the author, but more often the publisher to whom the author assigned copyright).

Maintained by: JQ Johnson, jqj@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 10/22/2009
Creative Commons License