Scholarly Communications

Overview

Scholarly communication involves making your scholarly work accessible and interactive. We help you manage your information through the research process and communicate research results to the broader scholarly community and to the public.

UNI Scholarly Communication LibGuide

Rod Library

Learn how to assess and increase the impact of your research

Faculty may be asked to show the impact of their work for purposes such as a promotion and tenure file or for a grant application. The value of specific articles or other publications can be studied by looking at how many times they are cited in later publications and alternative channels such as tweets and blog posts. The impact of particular researchers can be studied by looking at bibliometric measures such as the number of works they have published and how many times and where their works as a whole have been cited.

Tools

  • Altmetrics: measuring the impact of scholarly output through social media by tracking number of tweets, blog posts, likes, bookmarks, figshare citations, video uploads, news outlets
  • Google Scholar: tracking citation metrics using popular indices and easy-to-read graphs
  • Journal Citation Reports: comparing and evaluating journals based on citation data, providing a variety of impact and influence metrics, including Journal Impact Factor, 
  • ORCID: providing a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers through integration in manuscript, grant submission, and in any research workflow to ensure credit attribution for scholarly work
  • Web of Science Citation Reports: gathering and organizing author information for the purpose of evaluating Author Impact. It can be used to discern patterns, find an h-index, and get a fuller picture of the publishing and citation history of an individual author

Manage your identity

Author identification tools help researchers deal with problems such as having a common name, having published under more than one name. They provide a persistent identifier that distinguishes individual authors from other researchers.

ORCiD

Orcid (Open Researcher & Contributor ID)
"ORCID 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." 

Where to publish

Where you publish will affect the impact of your work. Consider factors such as the following in deciding where to publish.

  • Quality of the journal
  • Relevance
  • Open access
  • Discoverability

Where to find information about specific journals

Connect with the research community

UNI ScholarWorks and Other institutional Repositories

UNI ScholarWorks is the name of the UNI institutional repository. Its purpose is to showcase the work done by UNI students, faculty, and staff and make it available permanently. Work by current UNI faculty may also be archived in the institutional repositories of other universities.

How does UNI ScholarWorks compare with other ways of sharing noted below? UNI ScholarWorks is a long term investment of the university. Commercial companies may not be around in the long term. Rod Library will work with you to identify rights and copyright permissions, including topics such as archiving author's manuscripts. Research Gate and Academica.edu require you to do all rights checking on publications that you post.

Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) promotes the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories around the world. UNI ScholarWorks is listed in the registry.

Open access

Open Access (OA) publications are digital, online, free of charge, and often have been assigned a Creative Commons license by the author (copyright holder).

OA publications

  • Remove price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, etc.) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions)
  • Are compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance
  • Come in a variety of formats including articles, monographs, data, software, online education, and more

More information about open access can be found at SPARC: Advancing Open Access, Open Data, Open Education.

Author rights

Iowa Board of Regents Strongly Encourages Retention of Some Copyrights

"The Board strongly encourages faculty, students, and employees of Regent institutions to seek to retain intellectual property rights to the articles and reports that they publish in scholarly journals and equivalent types of publications...Doing so on a systematic basis will ensure the widest possible dissemination at the lowest cost. Each institution shall be responsible for providing information, advice, and assistance to faculty, students, and employees to achieve this aim." -- Approved at the May 15-16, 2002 meeting, located under "Copyright Procedures" section.

Endorsement by the Faculty Senate at the University of Northern Iowa