Scholarly Communication
Digital Commons @ BU
Digital Commons @ Butler University is an open access repository dedicated to preserving and making accessible the intellectual and creative output of the University.
We’re interested in bringing your scholarship into Digital Commons — your book chapters, journal articles, book reviews, conference presentations, posters, podcasts, blog posts, and more — in an effort to create a comprehensive digital archive of Butler work.
Let’s extend the reach of your research!
- Works made available in Digital Commons will show up in Google and Google Scholar searches.
- Make your work available to scholars who may not otherwise have access to the journals in which you’ve published.
- Butler works have been downloaded over 300,000 times in the last year.
The best part? It’s NO extra work for you. All you have to do to get started is email a CV to Scholarly Communication Library Associate Olivia MacIsaac: omacisaa@butler.edu and/or Scholarly Communication Librarian Jennifer Raye: jraye@butler.edu.
Authors' Rights
Copyright consists of a bundle of rights that can be distributed in a number of ways. Frequently, Copyright Transfer Agreements have you sign over the copyright to your article, book, or scholarship to the publisher and then certain rights are licensed back to you.
It's important to review which rights are licensed back in your agreement, otherwise you could find yourself unable to distribute your work in the classroom, perform it in public, and place it in Digital Commons. Check out SHERPA/RoMEO (funny name, useful tool!) to find out what the policies are at your favorite journal.
It is becoming increasingly common for authors to request certain rights remain with them. For more information about authors' rights, check out the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition's page on the subject: Author Rights. Want to look over your most recent contract? Maybe you'd like to reserve some rights that your journal doesn't automatically give you? Shoot us an email or give us a call!
Open Access
If you are interested in making your work open access, the Scholarly Communication division can help you identify the best open access journals in your discipline, find a home for any datasets you'd like to make available, and also do the copyright clearance work so we can post your work in Digital Commons!
Depending on your agreement with the publisher (see Authors' Rights above) we may be able to make some or all of your work freely available. If you're interested in open access journals, check out the Directory of Open Access Journals, which has recently begun giving out a Seal of Approval to journals that meet certain standards.
Want to know whether you can post that article on your personal site? Curious if the journal you just found is any good? Contact Olivia MacIsaac or Josh Petrusa to set up a brief chat!
Digital Scholarship
Interested in the digital humanities? Curious about the rise of the electronic lab notebook? Need to do some data visualization? We're excited to collaborate with you on your digital projects and to experiment with new kinds of research and learning. Here are some of the kinds of services we offer. Your idea not included? That sounds amazing; send us an email!
- Brainstorming: what kinds of cool things can I do in my area?
- Project planning: equipment and resource needs; timeline development
- Project consultation: where to go from here?
- Text mining, machine learning, and natural language processing
- Digital exhibit creation: including digitization & work with the digital exhibit platform Omeka
- Data management & data management plans
- Data visualization & infographics: let's get visual!
- Multimedia projects & presentations
- Digital poster exhibits