In celebration of Open Access Week, we’ll be talking this week about how to share your work without paying a fee. Today we’ll get you started with open access repositories!

Day 1: Get familiar with repositories

There are many reasons to deposit your work in a repository like arXiv, PubMed Central, or the University Digital Conservancy (UDC). Submitting your work to an open-access repository can help ensure your work is available to everyone—not just to researchers who can afford subscriptions to databases and journals. You may also be doing a favor to your future self by keeping a copy of your work safe and available for you to reference in the future. Repositories like the UDC can make your article even more available for people to find through established connections to Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus. Some repositories like the UDC will even display useful metrics, like how many people have accessed your work and where they were located—which can be useful information to include if you’re applying for awards or a promotion. Finally, you may even be required to deposit your articles into a specific repository in order to satisfy the open access or public access requirements for most grantmaking agencies or organizations! (We’ll discuss how to deposit articles into the repositories specified in federal grants on Friday.)

Unlike open access versions provided by some publishers, most repositories do not charge people to make their articles open access—allowing researchers to keep more of their grant funding for their research.

Today, we’ll be covering how to find the repositories that are most relevant to you and your work. Some disciplines—like psychology, computer science, math, physics and economics—have very active subject-specific repositories. For researchers working in other disciplines, the UDC is always open!

Daily to-do: Find the repositories that apply to you and your work and add them to your reference document under “Repositories”

(No worries if it’s not there, we’ll show you how!)

Step 1: Search for your work in the University Digital Conservancy

Current UMN affiliates in any field of study are eligible to deposit work in the UDC, as long as they still have the right to publicly share their work. For more information on what kind of work can be deposited into the UDC, visit the repository’s website. (Not sure if you have the copyright to your published work? We can help! Get in touch with openaccess@umn.edu or copyinfo@umn.edu.)

You may already have work in the UDC if you or your co-author have shared it there. To check, search for your last name here: https://conservancy.umn.edu/browse/author

Let’s see how this can work in practice. Imagine an urban planning researcher is preparing for a project about public parks in the United States. They’ve come across a paper from University of Minnesota researchers that they think will be relevant for their literature review.

But our theoretical researcher doesn’t have access to the journal where the paper is published! This is an increasingly frequent problem for scholars in the United States and across the world, as libraries have been forced to cut back on journal subscriptions due to rising costs. Instead of getting access to the article, our researcher hits a paywall:

 

 

 

Our researcher doesn’t want to spend $49 from their grant on this publication; they have other expenses in their budget.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Instead, they go to Google Scholar to look for other versions of the article. And because the University of Minnesota authors deposited their work in the UDC, they can easily find another version of the text and (legally!) access the article:

Now, even without a subscription, the researcher can click on the “[PDF] umn.edu” link and go directly (for free!) to the full text of the article:

Sometimes, publishers have specific versions of the article that they’ll allow to be deposited into repositories. Check Tuesday’s post for more discussion about publisher’s rules.

Step 2: Find your discipline’s repository, if applicable

This year, Open Access Week’s theme is Community over Commoditization — and there are advantages to publishing in a repository that’s actively used by your community.

All UMN researchers are a part of the University community—which means that your work might be at home in our community’s repository, the UDC! In some disciplines, though, other well-established and respected  repository communities also exist, where authors in your discipline might share their work. (The University of Minnesota supports a number of these repositories through the Libraries’ Open Access Investment Fund!)

These repositories include arXiv — which hosts physics & math papers—as well as the other “Xivs” (e.g., PsyArXiv, bioRxiv, ChemRxiv, EarthArXiv, engrXiv, medRxiv). Disciplinary repositories aren’t a strictly STEM-based phenomenon; RePEc also exists for economics papers, SocArXiv (another Xiv!) and SSRN house social sciences papers, and the Law Archive is available for law articles. (Even if you don’t see your discipline listed here, there may still be a repository for you! Many repositories rely on the same software platform from the Open Science Framework. A list of repositories running on OSF is available here.)

In many cases, repositories can also provide valuable information on how your paper is being used. For example, the UDC will provide statistics about where readers of your paper are from, arXiv offers powerful bibliometric tools, and PsyArXiv provides public views and download counts for every submitted article!

Step 3: Find your funder’s repository, if applicable

Many funders, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, have specific requirements about which repositories researchers must use. Putting your work in a specific place is becoming an increasingly common stipulation for grant funding.

In addition to checking whether you have work in the UDC, you can also check to see if your funded work is where your grant funder says it should be. (More information about funder requirements is available from the Libraries website.)

Now that you’ve found these repositories where your work could be deposited, you’re ready for the rest of the week! Tomorrow, we’ll discuss how to figure out whether you have the legal rights necessary to deposit your work in the repository.