Scholars' Collaborative Tools Guide:Scholarly Communication & Publishing Tools

Licenses & Publishing Agreements

Creative Commons gives authors and creators control to choose which rights are important to them and which they do not wish to reserve; you can say "some rights reserved" instead of "all rights reserved" and give the public more permissions to your work than is typical under copyright.

From the same group of lawyers, professors, and advocates that brought us Creative Commons, the Science Commons gives scholars a variety of addenda to add to a publication agreement in order to help authors retain more of their rights.

Literature Reviews

• Guide to Help with the Literature

Author Identifiers

• ORCID: A non-profit organization that "provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized."

Publishing Options

• Open Publishing Support Fund: UT offers an Open Publishing Support Fund for researchers interested in open access publishing.
• PeerJ: UT has an institutional plan with this innovative open access publisher.

Archiving Research

• Trace (Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange) is UT's online institutional archive/repository.  If your publishing agreement allows it, you can deposit a copy of your articles (as well as other publications or presentations) into our open institutional repository.
• Search for Subject/Disciplinary Repositories using The Directory of Open Access Repositories, OpenDOAR, for other open repositories.

From the Center for Media & Social Impact at American University come several "Codes of Best Practices in Fair Use," developed by professionals in the following areas:

• Documentary Filmmaking
• Journalism
• Visual Arts
• Other areas, such as library science, poetry, dance archiving, and open courseware

Not sure what constitutes "fair use?"  Use the Fair Use Checklist, developed by Dr. Kenneth D. Crews at the Columbia University Copyright Advisory Office.