Scholarly Communications

Printer Friendly

What Faculty Can Do To Improve
Scholarly Communications

Higher education and governments spend billions of dollars a year to support scholarly research that their libraries then pay billions of dollars to buy back as published scholarship. Scholars who give their written work away by assigning copyright to publishers may lose some rights to use their own work, even in their own classrooms. It is time for UW faculty to take steps towards transforming the structure of scholarly communication. Here are some things you can do.

As Authors, Editors, and Reviewers, You Can...
  1. Submit papers to quality journals that have reasonable pricing and copyright practices. Consult with your subject librarian who may have comparative journal pricing information for your discipline such as that found in the University of Wisconsin Libraries' Journal Value Project for science and social science journals. In most cases, you can retain copyright while licensing certain non-exclusive rights to the publisher. For publishers' copyright policies, search the SHERPA site.

    Negotiate journal publishing contracts to retain all or some of your rights such as:

    • Sending reprints to colleagues
    • Distributing copies to classes
    • Including your work in a course pack
    • Author/institution self-archiving--posting your work on your home page, your institutional repository, or a subject archive
    • Review license possibilities such as the SPARC's license addendum or Creative Commons' licenses.

  2. Refuse to review for or to serve on editorial boards of unreasonably expensive journals and let them know why.

  3. If you are currently an editor of an expensive title, urge the editorial board to demand that the publisher reduce the price to a more reasonable level. Failing that, try to move the journal to a non-profit publisher or an open-access/alternative publisher such as those listed in either the Directory of Open Access Journals, or in SPARC's Publisher Partners list. Yet another option is to resign, in accordance with any applicable contractual obligations, and ally with a more reasonably priced commericial publisher.

As a UW Faculty Member, You Can...

  1. Investigate UW's intellectual property policies and participate in updating them.

  2. Work to revise tenure policies to include a lessening of the current emphasis on quantity as a criterion for tenure and promotion, and a full acknowledgment of electronic publication as a format for communicating research.

  3. Encourage discussion of scholarly communication issues and proposals for change in your departments and schools.

  4. Self-archive your papers in the UW's DSpace, a digital institutional respository. Institutional archives can present your department's body of work to the world and preserve it for free access. As an alternative, encourage colleagues to self-archive their papers on their home pages, and/or in discipline-oriented archives, such as arXiv. Work to encourage your colleagues and department to systematically send all faculty papers to DSpace or a similiar archive.

As Users of UW Libraries, You Can ...

  1. Support UW Libraries' cancellation of expensive low-use titles and encourage colleagues to do the same.

  2. Invite library participation in faculty departmental meetings and graduate seminars to discuss scholarly communication issues.

  3. Include librarians when meeting with publishers' representatives.

  4. Familiarize yourselves with studies of journal costs, such as these:


Send Questions or Comments to: scinfo@u.washington.edu
Last modified: Friday December 07 2007