Digital Commons@pvamu.edu: Open Access Information

As journals and publishers create new open access policies, some bad actors have created journals that sound similar to high-impact journals, but are meant to trick authors into paying open access fees for a truly low-impact journal. Resources such as Think, Check, Submit give guidelines for avoiding journals and publishers engaged in predatory practices.

The Directory of Open Access Journals lists well-known open access publications and Sherpa-Romeo lists hybrid Open Access publications.

In general you should never pay a publisher to consider your work, much less reprint your work. (Some publishers charge authors for various services *after* accepting an article, but that is a different situation.)

To learn more about Institutional Repositories such as the bepress Digital Commons, please visit the system's research page.

This non-profit organization has provided an easy way for you to share your creative work. Without relinquishing any of your copyrights,  use a Creative Commons license to allow others to reproduce your copyrighted work and stipulate conditions that must be met. For example, you may require attribution and no commercial use. These and other conditions have been pre-bundled in various combinations; you pick one of these license bundles from the Creative Commons menu. A plug-in is available for Microsoft Office that simplifies this task.

• Attribution BY

  This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.
• Attribution-Share-Alike BY-SA

  This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
• Attribution-No-Derivs BY-ND

  This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
   
• Attribution-NonCommercial BY-NC

  This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
   
• Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike BY-NC-SA

  This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
   
• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

  This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.