While we are not legal experts, the librarians are happy to point you to guidelines and resources that will help answer any of your individual copyright questions. Whether it be showing a film in class or navigating the use of an image in your book publication, copyright is a complicated issue. Please feel free to reach out to us or consult our guide to copyright resources.
Changes in the world of scholarly publishing have also changed how scholarly works are distributed and how we think about the relative importance of various journals. Traditionally, the focus has been on a journal’s impact factor, which refers to the average number of times that current articles in a journal are cited. Impact factor is a single type of bibliometrics, but over time, other options have emerged, including algorithms offered by some groups that claim to offer a better sense of the true quality of journals. In addition, bibliometrics such as h-index allow authors (or their employers) to measure their productivity and impact. But, what is left out of bibliometrics is the new way that articles are used, shared, and discussed online through blogs and social networks.
The librarians are happy to assist you in tracking citation data and can point you to some of the newer tools available for you to track this data on your own, such as the Altmetric Bookmarklet.
The publishing landscape has changed dramatically in the last number of years and while faculty may know the top journals they wish to publish in, navigating the contracts of various publishers can seem daunting. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published a bibliography on resources related to author's rights.
The librarians can also assist you with resources regarding the relative merits of open access journals.
For more information on author's rights from SPARC, see their brochure outlining their author addendums.
The librarians are happy to perform literature searches on your behalf on a case by case basis. Ideally, we would like to consult with you to establish the parameters of your search, your timeline, and your preferred delivery mechanism. If you are a Zotero user, you may also choose to do collaborative searches with us by adding us to your Zotero group.