Take Action

Universities, Societies and Scholars Work to Improve Publishing

• Seek out opportunities to act as a peer reviewer for open-access journals.
• Invite your library liaison to your department's faculty meeting to discuss easy ways to manage Author's Rights.
• Encourage your society to create competitors to expensive journals.
• Adopt promotion & tenure policies supporting high-quality, low-cost publications, such as peer-reviewed online journals.
• Monitor discussions of publishing issues within your society and elsewhere.
• Contribute your thoughts on these issues to the University's Transforming Scholarly Communication blog.

Choosing a Publisher

• Search for the publisher's/society's webpage to see information on their policies and prices.
• Consider whether a journal's or publisher's practices match your values, when you're deciding whether to write or referee or edit for them.
• Contact your subject librarian for assistance.

Author Rights

• Modify the agreement supplied by the journal publisher to retain more of your rights. The University of Minnesota has endorsed an author's addendum [PDF] that you can attach to the journal publisher agreement. More choices for an author's addendum are available from Science Commons.
• Alternatively, submit your articles to publishers with enlightened copyright policies. As noted above, SHERPA RoMEo summarizes many publisher policies.

Copyright and Fair Use

• Use the Copyright Decision Map to determine whether your prospective use is covered by the U.S. Copyright Act's Fair Use exemption.
• Learn how to create persistent links to library-licensed content for your course, as a copyright-compliant alternative to printing or posting copies for your students

Alternative Publishing Models

• Identify an appropriate peer-reviewed Open Access journal in your discipline by consulting DOAJ: The Directory of Open Access Journals. You can look up journals by title or by subject discipline. Remember that the U Libraries partially subsidize your submissions to BMC and PLOS journals (15% for BMC, 10% for PLOS).
• Deposit your work into the University of Minnesota's open digital archive, the University Digital Conservancy.
• Check the status of the NIH open access policy and related legislation at the SPARC Advocacy site.