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Publishing in the Physical Sciences and Engineering

Scholarly publishing is undergoing rapid change. This page lists resources on a broad range of issues, including:

Authors' rights

Digital Repositories

Publisher Policies

Journal Impact Factors

Authors' Rights

• CIC Author's Addendum
  A template to propose amendments to a publisher's copyright agreement in order to retain author's rights, e.g., the right to make articles available in a non-commercial open digital archive such as the University's Digital Conservancy or PubMedCentral.
• Self-playing slide show on author's rights

Digital Repositories

• University Digital Conservancy
  A venue for faculty to deposit copies of their works for long-term preservation and open access.
• arXiv
  Electronic preprint service for physics, mathematics, computer science, computational biology.

• NIH PubMedCentral
  An open access archive for health and life sciences. An NIH Public Access Policy now asks that all articles resulting from research funded by the NIH be deposited in PubMedCentral. Faculty should consider this policy and the terms of copyright transfer agreements when submitting articles for publication. Details of the NIH Public Access Policy, with links to help at the University of Minnesota.

Publisher Directories

• SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access)
  Summarizes permissions for each journal or publisher; specifies whether an article may be posted on the web as a pre- or postprint.

• Green Publishers
  List maintained by Sherpa ROMEO of "Green Publishers" which allow full compliance to posting post- and pre-print copies of a work to an institutional repository.

• Publishers that permit archiving of their PDF
  List maintained by Sherpa ROMEO.

• Ulrich's Periodical Directory
  An international directory of journals in all fields.
• Directory of Open Access Journals
  Covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.

Policies of Selected Publishers (from SHERPA)

Note: these policies are sometimes complex -- please check the details on SHERPA or publisher's Web site
SHERPA rates publishers by color. Green is the most author-friendly; white is the least friendly.

PUBL.	STATUS	ADD TO UM DIGITAL CONSERVANCY	POST ON PERSONAL WEB PAGE
AAS	green		publisher's PDF
ACM	green	author's pre-refereed version	author's post-refereed version
ACS	white		only abstract + tables, figs.
AGU	green		author's post-refereed version
AIAA	white
AIP	green	publisher's PDF	publisher's PDF
AMS	green	publisher's PDF	publisher's PDF
APS	green	publisher's PDF	publisher's PDF
ASCE	white	author's post-refereed version after 90 days	author's post-refereed version after 90 days
ASME	white
Elsevier	green	author's post-refereed version	author's post-refereed version
IEEE	green	publisher's PDF	publisher's PDF
Springer	green	author's post-refereed version after 12 mo.	author's post-refereed version

Impact Factors and other Measures

• Impact Factor -- ISI Journal Citation Reports
  Data from the Thomson ISI Web of Science
• Eigen Factor Data
  Free web-based service that ranks journal by their eigen factor as well as maps the information for visualization.

• SCImago Journal and Country Rank
  SCImago Journal and Country Rank (SJR)uses Scopus data to rank thousands of journals.

• Journal Info
  Journal Info gives a summary of quality and publishing practices for about 18,000 titles.

Other Resources

• "Transforming Scholarly Communication" -- from the University Libraries
  Devoted to issues in scholarly publishing and action faculty can take to retain their rights.
• Association of Research Libraries
  Faculty speak out on scholarly communication issues.

• What is Open Access?
  Learn more about this emerging publishing model at this OA publishing news blog.

• Alternative Publishing Models
  Learn about publishers and societies that are breaking the scholarly communication mold at SPARC, a web site by the American Research Libraries.

Questions?

• Subject Librarians in Science & Engineering