Sharing Your Work

New technologies have created an increasing number of opportunities for you to share your work with a broader community of readers and colleagues. You may already have a personal webpage where you post your articles or link to information about your recent projects. This page lists several other options for making your work more broadly available.

BEARdocs

BEARdocs is an institutional repository that provides access to published and unpublished work by Baylor University faculty and students. Work deposited in BEARdocs will be crawled by Google and other search engines, preserved over the long term, and made available at a URL that will never break.

For more information, visit BEARdocs.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization that has developed a set of free public licenses that enable authors and creators to allow others to make certain uses of their work without asking for permission. Their tagline "Some Rights Reserved" emphasizes the idea that creators can keep some of their rights while choosing to share the rest. You can use Creative Commons licenses to share your writing, teaching materials, photographs, or any other works for which you hold the copyright. For an brief overview of Creative Commons, take a look at this "7 Things You Should Know About Creative Commons" provided by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative.

For more information, visit Creative Commons.

Open Access journals

Open access journals are freely available on the Internet and do not charge for access to their materials. Users may read, download, copy, distribute, print, or link to the full texts of these articles without asking for permission. There are an increasing number of quality, peer-reviewed open access journals available on the web. Choosing to publish your work in an open access journal ensures that you, your students, and your colleagues will be free to use the work in the future, and improves the accessibility of your work to readers throughout the world.

Although open access journals are freely available, that doesn't mean there is no cost in producing and providing access to them. A new publication, "Income Models for Supporting Open Access" provides detailed options for the continued sustainability of open access journals.

For background about the Open Access movement, visit Peter Suber's "Open Access Overview".

For a list of open access journals, visit the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Subject Repositories

Many disciplines and research areas have their own online repositories where scholars can deposit data, abstracts, and pre- and post-print versions of their articles. Some of the biggest are:

• arXiv (for mathematics and physics articles),
• EconPapers (Economics working papers),
• ICPSR (for social science data),
• PubMed Central (for biomedical journal articles).

These repositories can be an excellent way to share work with your colleagues and increase your visibility on the web. However, be aware that some publishers may object to the inclusion of your article in a free database, even a pre-print draft, and may require that you remove it prior to publication.