ScholarWorks

Share your research and scholarship by posting your journal articles in ScholarWorks, the CSU open access repository. Open access provides increased visibility of and access to the research produced at CSUSM. The immediate and widespread availability of material in ScholarWorks provides worldwide access to scholarship, particularly to those that don’t have paid subscriptions to academic journals. The increased visibility and accessibility often results in increased readership and more citations. It is online access to the scholarly output of the campus community anytime, anywhere there is a computer and an internet connection and helps to remove the obstacle of privilege to scholarship.

Submitting your publications to ScholarWorks is as easy as uploading them to the library. The library staff will make the publications ADA compliant and upload them for you. If you have several publications, you may email the list (or your CV) to Carmen Mitchell, the Scholarly Communication Librarian.

My research was funded by a grant and the granting organization has said I must make my findings publicly available. Would depositing it in ScholarWorks cover this requirement? 
Some grant and funding organizations have open access requirements for their recipients, requiring them to place their research into publicly accessible repositories like PubMed Central. The National Institutes of Health has had an open access requirement for grantees since 2008, and recently announced that they will begin holding back funding from researchers that do not comply with this requirement. The Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act (AB609) requires the final copy of any peer-reviewed research funded by California State Department of Public Health to be made publicly accessible within 12 months of publication. Meeting the requirements of AB609 will necessitate engagement and education initiatives with scholarly communication stakeholders across all California-based institutions.

Do I have to get permission from my co-authors to contribute to ScholarWorks?
No. Under US copyright law, any joint author can give nonexclusive permission to copy and distribute the work, so long as they share profits with the other joint authors. To deposit an article in ScholarWorks, you grant CSUSM a nonexclusive license and no money changes hands. From a legal perspective CSUSM authors can post their articles without checking with their co-authors. The best practice is to treat ScholarWorks like other co-authorship issues – determining author order, reporting contributions, etc. You should discuss the issue among co-authors as part of the writing and publication process.