Copyright and Scholarly Communication

This webpage provides information about important issues affecting modern scholarship and publishing, including open access and copyright. Please follow the links for more information, or contact library@dickinson.edu.

  • Copyright Guidance
  • Open Access Publishing

Copyright Guidance

In this web site and its publications respecting copyright, the College reaffirms its commitment to current copyright law and the protection of intellectual property. The College also recommits itself to providing relevant common sense guidelines to help faculty and students remain within the legal parameters of existing law. Nevertheless, the College urges everyone at Dickinson to recognize that copyright law can be complicated. In the final analysis, legal compliance with existing law is the sole responsibility of individual members of the Dickinson community.

The library serves as an avenue for obtaining copyright by working closely with the national Copyright Clearing Center. If you wish to obtain copyright clearance or if you have questions about the legality of your copying or scanning, please consult the following:

To learn more about copyright, see:

If you need copyright clearance for course packs, please use our form:

Additional information is available about the Library's Reserve and Film Booking Service for faculty.

 

For more information contact: reserves@dickinson.edu or phone (717) 245-1142.

 

Oct. 10, 2012

Open Access Publishing

This section contains information for those interested in open access publishing, and to accompany the Waidner-Spahr Library and TCWW co-sponsored faculty lunch A Conversation About Open Access Publishing, held November 29th in the East Asian Studies Room.

Open access refers to the ability to freely access a scholarly article from anywhere in the world, without the need for a journal subscription. Removing the subscription barrier has been shown to increase the visibility of scholarship, with a corresponding increase in citation rates. Open access takes a variety of forms, including institutional or discipline-specific repositories for pre-prints; mandates requiring specific government-funded research articles to be placed in PubMed Central; and born-digital open access journals. All of these forms can enhance the distribution of knowledge and broaden the impact of scholarship.

Open access publishers like BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLOS) prove that open access is fully compatible with peer-review, high quality editing and publishing, and journal impact factors. Open access journals are fairly new, but many are developing a good reputation, and in some cases are replacing traditional journals as the desired place to publish.

For a background on Open Access issues, start with these articles:

To learn more about open access, visit the following websites:

 

Dec. 4, 2012