Traditional publishers’ agreements often transfer copyright from the author to the publisher, giving them the right to reproduce and redistribute your work.
The most important thing you can do is read your copyright transfer agreement. Don’t like what it says? You can amend the agreements to retain the rights you need to make copies of your work and to share it with others.
Examine your publishers’ agreements
What is the publisher requiring of you? Those agreements that require you to transfer all your rights limit what you can do with your own work—that is, you are no longer the copyright holder.
If your publisher agreement reads something like: “the undersigned authors transfer ownership of copyright, including the right to publish and distribute the work by any means, method, or process whether now known or to be development in the future, to the Publisher,” consider amending the agreement.
Agreements that let you retain control of your work often have phrases like: “I grant the journal a non-exclusive license to publish my work”; “I understand that no rights are transferred to the Journal”; or “I understand that a Creative Commons license will be applied to my work.”
If you’ve retained the right to post to an online archive, submit your work to the MOspace Institutional Repository. An institutional repository, like MOspace, is one of the best ways to disseminate and preserve your work. As an open access tool, MOspace ensures that current and future generations of scholars benefit by finding your work.
It’s MULSA’s 75th anniversary and we are working on a 75th anniversary cookbook! Please submit your favorite, treasured, fun, creative, etc. recipes: https://forms.gle/QFBYrkMkXnLfm9A5A
Date: Friday, October 11, 2024
Time: 3:00pm – 4:00pm
Online via Zoom Registration
The Introduction to Dimensions webinar will showcase how researchers can use this powerful database to find collaborators, track funded activity, identify trends and more.
Predatory publishing doesn’t just take advantage of authors by misrepresenting review, editorial, and fee structures. It also hinders access to the work itself, hurting the overall enterprise of research. The epidemic of predatory journals reached serious enough heights in 2016 that the Federal Trade Commission charged OMICS, one such publisher of hundreds of predatory journals, for its deceptive practices.
“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” says Janice Dysart, Science Librarian and creator of the Where to Publish Your Research guide. “Be wary of these email solicitations from publishers trying to get you to submit articles to their journals.” She recommends using the Think Check Submit checklist to determine whether a publisher is legitimate.
Anyone can fall victim to predatory journal publishers. Jung Ha-Brookshire, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies, College of Human Environmental Sciences, and Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Textile and Apparel Management, relates her experience after a graduate student recommended a journal a few years ago. She says, “I didn’t think twice about it. We submitted our paper and got accepted without any revisions. Then they were asking us to send money somewhere in Pakistan.” She still didn’t realize what was happening because she hadn’t even heard of “predatory journals.”
That all changed about a year later when she learned of a list of predatory journals from her colleagues. “We found out that our journal was on that list,” she says. They tried to withdraw their work from the publication but couldn’t. Because the journal wasn’t legitimate, the article could only be found via the specific URL and not by searching, so they pulled the publication information from their CVs. Jung says, “We had to take that manuscript as a loss because we couldn’t even take that paper to other publishers since, technically, it is already published.”
After that experience, Jung now checks with her subject librarian, Noël Kopriva, every time she encounters a journal she hasn’t heard of, “no matter how good the website looks.” Jung advises, “Be careful with choosing the right journals. Do not get fooled by address, location, a beautiful website, and a wonderful set of editorial board names. Check with your librarian first when in doubt!”
Did you know that the Health Sciences Library has a rare book room? The Donald Silver Rare Book Room was donated to the library by the Department of Surgery in honor of Dr. Donald Silver, an emeritus professor. lt is located on the third floor of the Health Sciences Library, directly adjacent to the elevator. Viewing hours of rare books in the collection or of the room itself are available by appointment. Items can be used for research purposes and under limited conditions borrowed or scanned for use with the permission of the Rare Book Librarian or the Director of the Library, Deb Ward.
A “rare” book is considered rare because of the scarcity of item, not because of its dollar value, although at times that can be considerable. Rarity is based on a few factors: that there are few exemplars in existence, that they are primary source materials, that the intellectual content of the materials is significant, or they are old and fragile. Any one or more of those factors establishes that an item is “rare.”
The items in the Rare Book Room at HSL are placed there if they are printed before 1900 or are selected by the Director or HSL Librarians. Criteria for selection can also include considerations such as special examples of binding, fine paper, printing, or because they contain significant illustrations. Some titles are fascimilies, expertly reproduced copies, of important manuscripts and early printed books.
An item is given rare book status and retained in our library if the item affords a needed perspective on contemporary studies, or provides the opportunity to learn about early developments in the field of medicine. Other criteria include providing a historical focus on the patient, the medical environment, or medical institutions. Items, which identify a historical person or trends in medicine, or have a historical background to technological breakthroughs, are also given rare book status. We are particularly interested in collecting items relating to early medicine in Missouri.
Many of the books in our collection were donated by Clarence Martin Jackson, a former graduate of the University of Missouri. He received a B.S. in 1898, an M.S. in 1899, and an MD in 1900, all from Mizzou. He became dean of the Medical school from 1909 to 1913, and spent the rest of his career at the University of Minnesota. Jackson left over 12,000 items from his personal collection to the University of Missouri Libraries, including many of the volumes in the HSL Rare Book Room. Other books in the collection have been donated by many generous supporters over the years, or were originally purchased for the use of students and faculty in the medical and nursing programs.
This exhibit highlights some of the important works from our collection.
The works on exhibit are:
Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring. Icones embryonum humanorum. Frankfurt: Varrentrapp and Wenner, 1799.
Giovanni Battista Morgagni. De Sedibus et Causis Morborum per Anatomen Indagatis. Venice: Ex Typographia Remondiniana, 1761.
John Huxham. An essay on fevers, and their various kinds, as depending on different constitutions of the blood: with dissertations on slow nervous fevers; on putrid, pestilential, spotted fevers; on the small-pox; and on pleurisies and peripneumonies. London: S. Austen, 1750.
Claudius Galen of Pergamon. Libri tres : Primus, De facultatum naturalium substantia. Secundus, Quod animi mores, corporis temperaturam sequuntur. Tertius, De propiorum animi cujusque affectuum agnitione & remedio. Paris: Simon Colinaeus, 1528.
Florence Nightingale. Notes on nursing. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1894.
Girolamo Cardano. De methodo medendi. Parisiis: Rovillii, 1565.
Dr. Noah Heringman, the Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English at MU, specializes in the relationship between literature and the history of ideas in the late 18th and 19th centuries. He and his editorial team were recently awarded a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations grant to complete their digital edition of Vestusta Monumenta. Vetusta Monumenta was the first of four major publication series launched by the Society of Antiquaries of London in the eighteenth century. Seven volumes were published between 1718 and 1906.
An engraving from”Vetusta Monumenta” of King Richard II in the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey. (Courtesy of University of Missouri-scalar.usc.edu/works/vm/plate-iv-westminster-portrait-of-richard-ii-nh?)
“Kelli Hansen of Special Collections help[ed] us a great deal during the early stages of the process. She gave Amy Jones, [our first research assistant], access to the division’s Indus 9000 book scanner and taught her how to use the software needed for processing the images. After Amy graduated in 2013, two more key players came on board the project: Felicity Dykas, who is now the head of Digital Services in Ellis, and Kristen Schuster, a PhD student in the iSchool (SISLT), who became Amy’s replacement. Felicity and her team took over the scanning project and scanned the remaining five volumes of Vetusta Monumenta at a uniformly high standard of excellence and added them to the University of Missouri Digital Library using the library’s Islandora content management system. In these early years, we got excellent support from other librarians, including Mike Holland (head of the division), Anne Barker, Ann Riley, Ala Barabtarlo, and others.”
The NEH grant is part of a category of funding that supports the “preparation of editions and translations of texts that are valuable to the humanities but are inaccessible or available only in inadequate editions.” This prestigious grant will allow Dr. Heringman, and his co-project director, Dr. Crystal B. Lake of Wright State University, to publish the remaining 144 plates in volumes 1-3, will full commentary by Fall 2020.
An engraving from “Vetusta Monumenta” of a baptismal font in St. James’s Church, Piccadilly (Courtesy of University of Missouri-scalar.usc.edu/works/vm/plate-iii-marble-baptismal-font-1?)
Vetusta Monumenta provides an intimate record of the kinds of objects collectively judged to be important by a large body of scholars and amateurs over generations. In some cases, these prints are the sole record of those artifacts and monuments, so digital preservation of these prints is vital. A previous digital version exists, but is not open access and does not provide high quality images. Dr. Heringman and his team have made this present edition accessible to all, while also providing scholarly commentary and search tools in order to browse through images.
“With substantial collaboration from the Society of Antiquaries, the Association for Networking Visual Culture at USC, and a growing team of scholarly collaborators, we had published twenty-six plates with commentary, a general introduction, and extensive editorial apparatus by mid-2017, and were able to secure a three-year, 286-thousand dollar Scholarly Editions Grant from the NEH to complete the project.” The project may be viewed at vetustamonumenta.org
Cycle of Success is the idea that libraries, faculty, and students are linked; for one to truly succeed, we must all succeed. The path to success is formed by the connections between University of Missouri Libraries and faculty members, between faculty members and students, and between students and the libraries that serve them. More than just success, this is also a connection of mutual respect, support, and commitment to forward-thinking research.
If you would like tosubmityour own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.
