W&M Libraries is invested in helping W&M faculty promote and preserve their research and scholarship. We are committed to creating an environment that supports high-quality research, fair author rights, and equitable and sustainable access to scholarly content. Our liaisons provide expertise in the following areas:
- Open access (OA) publishing
- Read & publish agreements and discounts
- Author's rights
- Publishing and research promotion
- Copyright and fair use policies
- Data management
- Open Education Resources (OER)
Open Access (OA) Publishing
Open access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the licensing rights to use these articles in the digital environment. W&M research published open access is cited nearly twice as many times as research published behind a paywall. Learn more about the ways we support OA publishing in our research guide.
Read & Publish Agreements
Read and publish agreements, also known as transformative agreements, are a type of contract between libraries and publishers that shift the cost of subscription-based reading to open access publishing. When your work is accepted for publication in a journal with a read and publish agreement, you will retain full copyright ownership of your work, and any article publication charges (APCs) or processing fees required to make your work open access will be fully or partially paid. These transformative agreements are meant to support research that is not already tied to grants that cover publishing fees.
W&M Libraries and VIVA (a statewide collaboration) have negotiated several agreements with a variety of publishers. Some of the agreements include:
- 400 Journals with Cambridge University Press
- Wiley’s Fully Gold Open Access Journals
- All PLoS (Public Library of Science) Journals
- View all available read and publish agreements
We also provide a library-sponsored OA publishing support fund for researchers who want to publish their work OA but did not receive external funding.
Author's Rights
W&M Libraries can help ensure you retain rights to your work in a manner that allows you and your students and colleagues to use your work in teaching, research, and other purposes. Publishers draft agreements or contracts that outline the transfer of some or all of these rights. If you aren't careful, you could transfer all of your rights to the publisher which could severely limit subsequent use of your own work, including in teaching and further research.Transferring copyright doesn’t have to be all or nothing though. Publishers only need the right of first publication, not a wholesale transfer of copyright (an "exclusive right"). Learn more about retaining rights to your work in our research guide.
Promotion of W&M research and scholarship
We can help you through all stages of the publishing process: from finding relevant journals to publish in to promoting and measuring your research impact.
One impactful way we support W&M faculty and students is through the university's institutional repository, W&M ScholarWorks. ScholarWorks is incredibly successful at promoting your work in Google, Google Scholar, etc by offering links to the full-text of faculty publications, either the published version or pre-print/post-print if appropriate. It also offers social media stats regarding publications in the repository, e.g. how many times they have been mentioned in Twitter, Facebook, etc.
A feature of ScholarWorks of particular interest for building a scholarly web presence is the free-to-use SelectedWorks Gallery. Faculty can create and host their faculty profile, and link to your work in and outside of the repository. Departmental websites can link out to profiles, and profiles in SelectedWorks can be reused if faculty or staff go to another institution that uses the same underlying software (Bepress).
W&M Libraries can also help faculty with journal publishing. If you are on the editorial board for a journal or if the journal is an official William & Mary publication, you can publish and use the built in peer-review software through ScholarWorks at no charge to the journal. Ask us for more information about this opportunity.
Interested in getting started with ScholarWorks? Our Library staff will set up your profile, answer questions and assist you along the way through our online form:
Copyright, fair use, Creative Commons help
W&M Librarians can help and support faculty and students with issues involving:
- Copyright
- Creative Commons licensing
- Fair use
- Embargoing their thesis or dissertation.
Data management
Need help with writing a data management plan to comply with your research grant or journal? We can help with data best practices for structuring and describing your data sets, as well as potential places to post your data set. Faculty research data can also post them in W&M ScholarWorks.
Open Education Resources (OER)
Open Education Resources (OER) refers to tools and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted digitally. Open Education strives to make education more affordable, accessible and effective.
Interested in adopting free, online textbooks to save your students money (who spend about $1400 annually on them)? We can help you identify what’s out there (including library subscriptions to ebooks) or walk you through authoring your own. Refer to our list of OER to get started. You can also submit OER that you have already created (slide decks, handouts, etc) online in W&M ScholarWorks so that students and faculty everywhere can benefit from them.