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. This page presents factors to consider should you wish to place your work in the repository. Please contact us at libraries.research@wsu.edu.for more information.
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:
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 and open educational resources, datasets, and more. In general, we will need to receive the following from you:
The following video shows how you can deposit research on your own, but you can also get in touch with the library for assistance with any part of this process.
As noted in the above video, you have three options for sharing your work in Research Exchange:
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:
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.
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: