Research Guides: Author's Rights: Alternative Publishing Options

Alternative Publishing

We often think of publishing as referring to scholarly journal articles or monographs, but the publishing landscape encompasses much more than that. Consider the following research artifacts:

Conference papers and posters
White papers
Grey literature
Datasets

These are all potential ways to share research that aren't captured well in traditional publishing workflows. Additionally, work published in traditional journal venues is often inaccessible to the public due to paywalls. Open access platforms can provide alternative publishing venues that allow more readers to access the results of academic research. These include:

UND Scholarly Commons
UND's institutional repository accepts research materials authored by UND affiliated staff, faculty, and students. This includes but is not limited to articles, conference papers, white papers, and datasets.
Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR)
OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories. As well as providing a simple repository list, OpenDOAR lets you search for repositories or search repository contents.
Open Educational Resources Guide
Chester Fritz's Open Educational Resources Guides offers additional resources for locating open publishing venues for books, articles, and images.

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship [movie]
A documentary which focuses on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google.

Staying true to the open access model: it is free to stream and download, for private or public use, and maintains the most open CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons designation to ensure anyone with an Internet connection will have access.