LibGuides: Scholarly Communications: Repositories and Self-Archiving

Institutional Repositories

IRSC Libraries hosts and maintains the IRSC Digital Archives and Special Collections. This digital library contains three main collections: Indian River State College, The Indian River Review, and Treasure Coast Collections. The Indian River State College collection comprises three sub-collections: College, Scholarly Works, and Students. The Scholarly Works sub-collection serves as IRSC's institutional repository.

The repository serves faculty and institutional interests by collecting, organizing, preserving, and disseminating faculty scholarship and creative works in a digital, open-access environment. In addition to archiving IRSC's scholarly output, the IRSC community can use the repository to support the publication of open-access journals, datasets, image galleries, and other content.

Benefits of Institutional Repositories

Authors can deposit a version of their published work
Increased professional visibility; greater impact of scholarship
Works discoverable via commercial search engines
Access to download statistics
Access to social media citation metrics or Altmetrics
Long-term preservation of works; authors not responsible for archival storage
Permanent links to works

Contents of an Institutional Repository could include (to list a few):

Faculty scholarship
Peer-reviewed Journals
Student works, journals, electronic theses and dissertations
Grey literature
Campus documents
Image galleries
Research datasets

Adopted from LMU's Scholarly Publishing LibGuide by Jessea Young

Using Repositories to Share Research

The final phase of the scholarly communication lifecycle is discovery and dissemination. Archiving your work in an institutional or disciplinary repository enhances the accessibility of your research. Archived works can include scholarship created in any phase of the scholarship lifecycle, such as: pre/post-prints, datasets, conference proceedings, theses/dissertations, and software.

Indian River State College Libraries maintains an institutional repository where faculty, staff, and student scholarship and research can be housed for online access. Contact Angie Neely-Sardon at asardon@irsc.edu for more information or to add your work to the collection.

Many federal funding agencies and other research sponsors have policies that require published articles and/or accompanying data to be publicly or openly available as a condition of funding. Self-archiving your work in the appropriate repository satisfies most of these requirements.

Ten simple rules to consider regarding preprint submission
As a result of an ASAPbio meeting held in February of 2016, a paper was published that describes the pros and cons of preprints from the perspective of the stakeholders—scientists, publishers, and funders. Here, we formulate the message specifically for scientists in the form of ten simple rules for considering using preprints as a communication mechanism.
Pre-prints, post-prints, and publisher's PDF explained
An explanation of the various versions of your article, how to find them, and when you can share them.
Direct2AAM: Helping Authors Find Author Accepted Manuscripts
A set of guides that provide easy to follow instructions for authors to obtain an Author Accepted Manuscript from their journal submission system, where the AAM is stored during the publishing process.

U.S. funding agencies

In February 2013, the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy released a memo mandating all federal funding agencies with budgets of $100 million or more to develop plans "to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research." Here are some resources for more information about individual plans:

Implementation of Public Access Programs in Federal Agencies
This is the federal government site which captures information as it is released to the public agencies. Including:
1) Public Access Plans of U.S. Federal Agencies
2) Award Dates Covered Under Public Access Policies for Publication and for Data Management Plans
Federal Agency Article and Data Sharing Requirements
This site, managed by SPARC, tracks, compares, and interprets U.S. federal funding agency requirements for sharing research articles and data.
Crowdsourced summary of responses
This spreadsheet is largely maintained by academic library-based data specialists, but all are welcome to use it, contribute to it, and share it.
Overview of OSTP Responses
A simplified chart view of the above spreadsheet.

Data Management Plan

A data management plan (DMP) is a written document that describes the data you expect to acquire or generate during the course of a research project, how you will manage, describe, analyze, and store those data, and what mechanisms you will use at the end of your project to share and preserve your data. Data management is best addressed in the early stages of a research project, but it is never too late to develop a data management plan.

For guidance or to arrange a consultation for developing a DMP, review the Research Data Management library guide.