About Scholarly Communication

ACRL defines scholarly communication as the system through which research and scholarship is created, evaluated, distributed, and preserved (ACRL).  The Electronic Resources & Scholarly Communication Department promotes research and scholarship initiatives at Tarleton and supports researchers throughout their academic career. Scholarly Communication provides services for every step of the research and scholarship process.

Copyright and Author Rights
The Tarleton Libraries offer consultations on copyright and fair use. We are unable to offer you legal advice, but can guide you to tools that will help you understand copyright, author’s rights and fair use. The library also offers advice on navigating licensing agreements, retaining and negotiating author rights through author addendums, Creative Commons, and other tools. Predatory publishing can be a challenging inconvenience for scholars. The Tarleton Libraries offer guidance on detecting predatory publishing tactics and how to avoid them.

• SPARC Addendum – Use the SPARC author addendum tool when negotiating journal publishing terms. Filling out the addendum and sending it to your publisher helps you retain certain rights to your work.
• Creative Commons – Use Creative Commons to license your work how you see fit. Select from a variety of options that allow you to decide if others can use your work for commercial purposes, adapt your work and share it.
• Cabells Scholarly Analytics (Journalytics) & Predatory Reports – Explore academic journals for impact factor, publishing practices and content guidelines. Predatory Reports provides information about publishers or journals suspected of predatory tactics.

Scholarly Reputation and Impact Services
Once a work has been published, it can be difficult navigating the numerous ways your research is shared and disseminated. The library offers guidance on subject specific repositories, academic social networking tactics, impact metrics, and other information that allows you to track and measure your scholarly impact.

• ORCiD – Set up a unique identifier that distinguishes you and your research. Use your ORCiD when submitting for publications, applying for grants, presenting at conferences, or other research activities to uniquely distinguish yourself. (Guide how to set up an ORCiD)
• Google Scholar Research Profile – Setting up a Google Scholar profile is simple. Follow the instructions located at the bottom of the Set Up Google Scholar page. Then you can begin to track your publications on Google Scholar.
• Research Gate – ResearchGate is an academic social networking site, similar to Facebook or LinkedIn, but with an emphasis on scholarship. You can upload copies of your work to share with others, so long as you still have the copyrights to do so.

Publishing and Open Resource Services
The library can assist researchers with finding open resources. This includes helping faculty find open educational resources (OER), instructing faculty on using and evaluating OER, or creating new academic resources for the classroom. Publishing services include guidance on selecting which journals to publish in and supporting university led publications. Articles that are published in OA journals are more likely to be downloaded and cited than traditional publishing. The Tarleton Libraries are happy to discuss the potential advantages of publishing open access and helping researchers navigate the process.

• Journal Indexing – Tarleton has several faculty run publications. Learn more about how to share your journal by having it indexed in prominent databases.
• Open Access Publishing Agreements for Tarleton Authors – Listing of current publisher agreements in place that allow for accepted articles to be published open access by Tarleton corresponding authors.
• Open Educational Resources – Dick Smith Library highly encourages the use of OER. Learn more about Finding, Utilizing, and Creating OER. Follow this link for a more comprehensive list of OER.

Research Data Management Services
Research Data Management is the continuous process of documenting, organizing, analyzing, storing, and sharing of data created during the research life cycle.  Many funders now require that researchers publically share their data on an open access repository. Storing data on a repository also gives researchers to the ability to link their data to publications or presentations, which increases transparency and reproducibility. Storing datasets on a repository provides long term preservation of research data.

Many repositories allow users to use a Creative Commons license to more easily share their data (see Copyright and Author Rights section above). The repositories listed below allow researchers to use a Creative Commons license and track number of downloads. These repositories also offer a suggested citation and DOI (unique digital object identifier) so that data can be found and referenced. Some repositories have additional features which are described below.

• MendeleyData – MendelyData also allows researchers to place an embargo on their data. A researcher can upload up to 10GB per dataset.
• Harvard Dataverse – This repository focuses largely on social sciences. Links to datasets can be shared on social media, and researchers can upload up to 10 GB per dataset.
• Zenodo – Zenodo is funded by CERN, Open AIRE, and the European Union, and is open to any science field. This repository allows embargoed data, and researchers can upload up to 50 GB per dataset.
• Figshare – This repository includes data from the sciences and humanities. Researchers can embargo their data, share links on social media, and can upload up to 5 GB of data.
• Scientific Data – This site provides a list of subject specific data repositories and can be a great place to start if none of the above repositories meet your needs. 
• re3data.org – re3data is a global registry of research data repositories. The registry covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. Use this resource to search and find data repositories and basic information about individual ones.

If you need assistance formulating a data management plan for a grant opportunity or the long term preservation of research data, please contact [email protected].

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