Copyright: Sharing Your Research

Scholar profiles and networking tools such as ResearchGate, Mendeley, and Academia.edu are very popular among the GW scholarly community. Also called scholarly collaboration networks, these tools allow you to share your research, find potential collaborators, and network with colleagues in your field. 

If you have one of these profiles, you have to be careful about uploading full-text of publications to be sure you are complying with copyright rules and publisher regulations. When you upload a file to any of these sites, you confirm that you have reviewed the file and that it does not infringe upon a third party's copyright or intellectual property rights. See the Author Rights tab for an explanation about signing over copyright to journal publishers, and your rights as an author in this regard.

Many publishers do not allow sharing of the final published version of articles. Some allow sharing of post-print/accepted manuscripts (after peer review, but before the publisher's final copyediting is applied), or pre-prints (before peer review). In some cases, a period of embargo may be required.

Publishers' policies can be found in the SHERPA/RoMEO database. View this video from the University of Rhode Island Libraries for a primer on how to locate your publisher or journal in SHERPA/RoMEO and check permissions. 

Health Sciences Research Commons (HSRC) is a online digital repository that houses the scholarly works and research output of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, the Milken Institute School of Public Health, the School of Nursing, and the Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library staff. Citations are routinely gathered by library staff, including full text when copyright permits, and authors are encouraged to deposit their own works into HSRC. 

Why deposit in HSRC?

• Increased visibility - Your works will be disseminated in the Digital Commons network of institutional repositories, allowing for a greater population of users to search, locate, and download your scholarship. 

• Archival abilities - Your works can be archived on the web in a format that is compliant with nationally accepted standards for digital preservation. 

• Permanent URL - HSRC provides a persistent link to your works, reducing the issue of obsolete or incorrect links. Anything deposited in Digital Commons becomes Google searchable and will show up in search results. 

• Community - HSRC offers you the chance to be a part of a larger community of scholars by including your works in subject-area Commons sites, containing open-access research from scholars in your field. 

For more information on submitting materials to HSRC and your rights as an author, see the Health Sciences Research Commons FAQs. 

• SHERPA/RoMEO - A site maintained by the University of Nottingham, UK, that lists publisher's policies regarding archiving of works in institutional repositories, pre-print and post-print. You may search by journal title, ISSN, or publisher.

• Open Access overview - A helpful primer on open access (OA), by Peter Suber of Earlham College. 

• Creative Commons licenses - A listing of the various Creative Commons licenses that you may apply to your original works, and the rights attached to each. 

• Directory of Open Access Journals - A comprehensive directory of open access journals and their licenses.