Skip to Main Content

Scholarly Communication Services at WSU

This guide is designed to increase awareness of significant issues associated with scholarly communication. It also presents resources for WSU researchers who wish to explore alternative avenues for sharing their scholarly work with a global audience.

Introduction: Showcasing Your Work

The WSU Libraries provide services to help you showcase your scholarly work online. Any member of the WSU community may share their work in Research Exchange, a digital repository that features research completed at this institution. Contact us at libraries.research@wsu.edu for more information or see the following:

Why Use Research Exchange?

Research Exchange is a digital repository where WSU community members may share and preserve their scholarly work and educational materials. The repository is indexed by major search engines, thus making its contents accessible to anyone with access to the Internet. Research Exchange adds value to the WSU community by:

  • Increasing the visibility of faculty and student scholarship and facilitating its discovery
  • Preserving institutional memory
  • Rapidly communicating new research to the national and global scholarly community
  • Allowing WSU community members to comply with federal and funder mandates to share research outputs with the general public
  • Supporting WSU's mission as a land-grant institution that has valuable knowledge to share with a global audience

Getting Started with Research Exchange

If you would like to share your work in Research Exchange, you have several options for doing so. We can work with you to post virtually any scholarly or educational material--documents, presentations, grey literature, media, syllabi, open educational resources, datasets, and more.

Before you begin, please consider the following:

  • Do you hold the copyright for the items you want to post? If you're not sure, contact us at libraries.research@wsu.edu and we will help you investigate.
  • Have you checked that your documents or materials are accessible to people using screen readers? If you're not sure, take a look at WSU's tutorials on document accessibility or WebAIM's guidance.
  • Do you have basic descriptive information for your materials? Make sure you have a few things ready to go like title, DOI, authors, description, and dates.
  • How large are your files? Data that is 1-2 GB may not upload easily via the public interface of Research Exchange. If you have trouble (or think you might), contact us at libraries.research@wsu.edu and we will assist.

Once you've considered these factors, click on the "sign in" button at the top of the Research Exchange homepage. Use your WSU login credentials. Once logged in, use the blue "add content" button to upload a file or a citation. A wizard will walk you through the steps.

Creating a Faculty Profile

Research Exchange permits faculty members at WSU to create profiles that feature their publications, presentations, grant awards, news mentions, research projects, and more. Because Research Exchange is linked to data sources like Pivot, WSU Libraries can get this profile started with citations and basic identifying information.

Faculty profile for Dr. Trevor Bond includes photo, expertise, ORCID identifier, webpage links, and outputs

Once you have a profile, you can:

  • Add citations with links to publications
  • Upload materials like slide-decks and datasets
  • Message WSU Libraries with corrections/additions
  • Request DOIs for materials like datasets that do not have an identifier

Contact libraries.research@wsu.edu to get started.

 

Posting to Research Exchange: Copyright Considerations

If you would like to post previously published work to Research Exchange, you will need to consider copyright. Anytime you create a piece of scholarship, you--as the author--automatically own the copyright for that work and, therefore, have the right to:

  • Reproduce your work
  • Distribute your work
  • Make adaptations
  • Publicly perform or display your work

However, when you publish your scholarly work, publishers often ask that you transfer all or some of these rights to them. Depending on the agreement you have made with the publisher, you may lose the ability to post work online, distribute it to students in course packs, or permit adaptations. More commonly, the publisher might restrict access to your work for a period of time or stipulate that you can only share a particular version of the work.

The WSU Libraries can help you determine whether work can be posted online by checking your publishing agreement, the publisher's website, or a database of publishers' policies called SHERPA/RoMEO. We can work with you to comply with publisher's requirements, so don't hesitate to contact us for assistance.

SherpaRoMEO sample record

Negotiating Your Copyright

If you would like to ensure that you can post your work online after publishing it in traditional venues, consider negotiating your agreements with publishers. When you publish, you can attach an addendum to your publishing agreement, asking to retain particular rights, such as your right to make your work freely accessible online. The following addenda have been created as suggested templates; however, you are welcome to borrow or repurpose as appropriate:

Research Exchange Demonstration, October 2022

WSU Libraries, PO Box 645610, Washington State University, Pullman WA 99164-5610, 509-335-9671, Contact Us