Scholarly Communication at WSU

Scholarly communication services at WSU Libraries are designed to help researchers rapidly circulate their scholarly work to a worldwide audience. Services are designed to support open access publishing, open data, and open education.

About

As a land-grant institution, Washington State University also values open access to information by sharing its expertise with a local and global audience, the university seeks to advance, extend, and apply knowledge in the world and on campus.

As expressed in WSU’s Drive to 25, the university strives to increase the visibility of its faculty and student scholarship in order to engage a wider national and international audience and, additionally, to facilitate opportunities for internal collaboration. In keeping with this mission, the WSU Libraries are continually developing services and resources to improve access to research at the university.

WSU Libraries invite you to consult the Guide to Scholarly Communication Services at WSU to learn more. Please contact libraries.research@wsu.edu or with any questions or requests for assistance.

Services

To help researchers at WSU share their work more widely, we provide the following tools, instruction, and services.

Research Exchange

Research Exchange is a digital repository where WSU researchers may share and preserve their scholarly work, including:

  • Articles and books (copyright permitting)
  • Conference proceedings and presentations
  • Grey literature and reports
  • Media
  • Open educational resources
  • Datasets

Materials in the repository are indexed by major search engines and made available to a worldwide audience. Through Research Exchange, the WSU Libraries endeavor to add value to the university community by:

  • decreasing publishing costs
  • rapidly communicating faculty research to scholars around the world
  • preserving institutional memory
  • improving discovery of university scholarship through quality metadata
  • creating a record of the university’s collective expertise
  • providing information about the use of institutional scholarship

For more information, please see this Guide to Scholarly Communication Services at WSU.

Researcher Profiles

WSU faculty members may create profiles in Research Exchange to feature their research materials and expertise. Contact libraries.research@wsu.edu for more information and to get started.

Support for Open Access Publishing

Open access (OA) is a model of publication that guarantees readers free access to research materials online. OA publishers fund their work in various ways—some by charging authors an APC or article processing charge and others by collecting donations and subscription fees or through use of volunteer labor.

If you want to publish open access, you can:

Check the Guide to Open Access Publishing Agreements to see which journals have a subsidized APC arrangement with WSU Libraries.

Data Management

Data management describes all of the processes for storing, describing, and providing access to research data. With the proliferation of born-digital data in the world, it has become particularly important for researchers to consider how they will preserve datasets and make them accessible to interested parties.

Increasingly, funders—and especially federal agencies—are also emphasizing the need for careful data management as well as public access to research findings. As of 2013, many U.S. federal agencies began requiring grant recipients to demonstrate how they would manage their research data and make it publicly accessible.

WSU Libraries provide resources to assist faculty and students in managing data per funder requirements. These include:

  • Use of Research Exchange to deposit data. Please note that for datasets over 100 GB, we may work with you to make alternative deposit arrangements.
  • Access to DMPTool, which provides templates for constructing data management plans as well as instructional materials, tutorials, and current information about federal mandates. Sign in using your WSU Network ID.
  • Support via consultations, guides, and instructional materials for constructing data management plans according to recommended best practices. Please request help or see this Guide to Data Management Plans for a basic overview of available tools.

DOIs

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are unique identifiers that are applied to publications and research outputs. Often used by journals, book publishers, and repositories, DOIs help people locate and access materials. If you would like a DOI for a dataset or other research materials, please contact WSU Libraries for assistance (libraries.research@wsu.edu).

ORCIDs

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a unique identifier that can help distinguish researchers with similar names. ORCIDs are widely used by publishers, funders, and educational institutions. They can travel with a researcher throughout their academic career, helping to establish authorship of datasets, monographs, and scholarly work that is not traditionally indexed in databases like Web of Science. ORCIDs operate like DOIs, facilitating links between research materials collected in various systems, platforms, and databases. You can claim your ORCID for free at orcid.org or contact WSU Libraries for assistance.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

WSU Libraries work with the Graduate School to make theses and dissertations available to the general public. As of 2021, both theses and dissertations are deposited in Research Exchange, WSU’s repository of research materials. For more information about submitting a thesis or dissertation, see Theses and Dissertations at WSU.

Open Access Textbooks

WSU Libraries collaborates with Global Campus to provide support for open textbook publishing via Pressbooks. Adapted from the WordPress platform, Pressbooks provides a template for creating textbooks that can be accessed by students in multiple file formats. See examples authored by WSU faculty in the Guide to Open Educational Resources and contact libraries.research@wsu.edu for assistance getting started.

Consultations

If you would like to share your work in Research Exchange, learn more about increasing the visibility of your scholarship, or find out about other services and tools related to scholarly communication, we invite you to arrange a consultation with a librarian. Please contact libraries.research@wsu.edu.