PUBLISH, DON’T PERISH!

Today’s guest post is courtesy of Sara Kuhn, CFL’s Scholarly Communication and Social Sciences Librarian. Thanks, Sara!

On October 22nd from 1:00 to 3:30 p.m., the Chester Fritz Library and UND Open Educational Resources/Open Access Working Group sponsored an event for Open Access Week 2018, entitled PUBLISH, DON’T PERISH! Retaining Your Rights & Maximizing Impact.

Thankfully, the event flourished and nobody perished!

Our fantastic guest speaker was Megan Wacha, Scholarly Communications Librarian at the City University of New York (CUNY) and President of Wikimedia NYC, who presented “Authors’ Rights when Authors Write,” a talk on strategies for authors to retain their rights and evaluate publishing and publisher options to maximize the impact of their work.

UND Librarians facilitated a short, mini-workshop on how to Retain Your Rights when publishing your work, providing sample publisher contracts (copyright transfer agreements) and author addenda. An invigorating Q&A and discussion ensued on how authors can negotiate rights retention and improve the reach and impact of their work!

Watch this short 5-minute video to get an overview on what we covered in the workshop. Also, check out our suite of scholarly communication guides, which includes the Author’s Rights and Publishing Strategies guides.

To wrap-up the session, and to invoke an ongoing discussion on open access in research and academia, we screened the movie Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, which can be viewed online. Have you wondered why your favorite small publishers seem to keep being gobbled up by the Big 5—publishers that now control over 50% of scholarly publishing? Or why faculty seem to do all the work related to research, but their own university libraries can’t afford to purchase their publications? Jason Schmitt of Clarkson University directed this fascinating documentary that features interviews with global scholars on these issues and more.