Scholarly Publishing

The scholarly journal publication world has been undergoing some changes during the last few years, and those changes may have an impact on the article submissions for journal publication by faculty members for the future. Due to a number of forces in the publishing world—subscription costs, publisher mergers and retention of copyright to name a few, a number of new models for scholarly publication have arisen to deal more constructively with these factors. A movement called open access is growing larger and larger, and is an attempt to bypass traditional publishers, to address the copyright situation and allow wider maximum access for little or no cost for journal article access. Most open access publications are readily available on the Internet shortly after publication and can be printed or used by anyone without copyright concerns with proper acknowledgement of sources.

To better educate faculty and students about what this means to their upcoming publishing efforts and to allow readers to learn more about the whole open access movement, Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library has added a new link to our Homepage, entitled “Scholarly Publishing”. The new link provides basic definitions of a variety of terms related to open access, shows the efforts of other institutions, and provides a number of articles and links for more detailed information. Clicking on http://www.gwumc.edu/library/resources/scholarlypublishing.cfm will take you directly to the new Scholarly Publishing page. It is also available by clicking on “Resources” on the upper left side of the Homepage, and then under “Additional Resources” halfway down the page. Since Scholarly Publishing is an initiative all who publish will be hearing a lot more about in the upcoming months, we hope the link will provide a place for you to obtain some initial education on open access and serve as a starting place for discovery of additional facts.