Skip to Main Content

Scholarly Communications: Home

Scholarly Communications at Musselman Library

Scholarly Communications is the system in which scholarship and research are created, evaluated for quality, shared, and preserved for future use. The system includes a range of formal and informal communications. Our office supports faculty and student publishing in both established and emerging forms; we are especially invested in advancing open publishing and open education. We can help with:

  • Author rights - understanding contracts, choosing and using Creative Commons licenses
  • Increasing visibility and impact - hosting faculty and student research and creative activity in our open access institutional repository, The Cupola
  • Open textbooks - assistance with adopting, adapting, or creating open textbooks and other Open Educational Resources; support for sharing your OERs in The Cupola
  • Scholarly publishing - journal publishing in The Cupola (including student run journals)

Musselman Library Supports Open Access

Why does Musselman Library support open access scholarship?

Library staff hold white boards that answer the question: "Why does Musselman Library support open access scholarship?"

Image collage created by Musselman Library interns during Open Access Week 2016.

The Cupola is Gettysburg College's open access institutional repository and the foundation of our commitment to open access and open publishing. We collect and share scholarly and creative works produced by faculty, students, and other members of the Gettysburg College community.

  • Faculty works include articles, book chapters, books, working papers, conference presentations, blog posts, and more. Works may be unpublished or previously published (we check copyright permissions before uploading previously published works).
  • Student contributions include papers, posters, creative works, artwork, photographs, scores, sound recordings, and screencasts. Excellent student works may be nominated by faculty or self-nominated. No student work will be included without the approval of the supervising faculty member or an appropriate proxy.
  • Six journals are published in The Cupola, including five undergraduate journals.

The Cupola is an open repository; its content is freely accessible to the world and searchable via Google Scholar and other search engines. Readers from 218 countries have visited The Cupola.

 

One of Musselman Library's strategic goals is to "advance scholarship across campus in its established and emerging forms."* This white speech bubble within orange circle reading "ask me about open access" including Open Access logoincludes educating library staff and the campus community about open access, digital scholarship, and other emerging methods of scholarship, as well as promoting and supporting open access scholarship on campus.

The Cupola - Open Access Institutional Repository

The Cupola is the foundation of our commitment to open access and open publishing. We collect and share scholarly and creative works produced by the Gettysburg College community. We also use The Cupola as a journal publishing platform.

Collection Development Support for Open Access
  • American Indian Culture and Research Journal - In 2023, the library helped fund this journal's transition to open access status via the LYRASIS Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP).
  • Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication - In 2022, Musselman Library helped fund this open access journal through the Lyrasis Open Access Community Investment Program (5-year commitment).
  • Demography - In 2020, Musselman Library supported this flagship journal of the Population Association of America as it converted from a commercial publishing model with Springer to an open access publishing model with Duke University Press. This project unfortunately ended in 2023.
  • The Public Domain Song Anthology - Musselman Library is an "Arranger" and sponsors "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"
  • Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development - On January 1, 2018, this journal "flipped" from a conventional, subscription model to an open access model. In Summer 2018, we reallocated budget dollars previously committed toward our institutional subscription to becoming a "shareholder" of this community-supported journal.
  • Luminos membership - In March of 2018 we became a member of Luminos, the University of California Press’ new Open Access publishing program for monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our membership includes a 10% discount on the Title Publication Fee for Gettysburg College faculty members.
  • Hate in America: The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s - we are a funding library for this collection of primary source newspapers being digitized by Reveal Digital. When the project is complete, it will be open access for everyone (during the digitization phase, only funding libraries have access).
  • Knowledge Unlatched - this project "unlatches" access to academic monographs. Musselman Library has supported the 2013-2018 rounds of the project (humanities and social science bundles only).
  • Open Library of Humanities - an open access humanities journal publishing platform with no author-facing charges. Gettysburg was one of the first liberal arts colleges to become a supporting institution.
  • SPARC institutional membership - SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is a global coalition committed to making "open" the default for research and education.
  • JSTOR Forum - The JSTOR/ARTSTOR platform provides access to digitized collections produced at colleges and universities, including Gettysburg College, and posted for public viewing.

     

Open Access Policy for Library Employees

In February 2016, Musselman Library employees adopted an open access policy that ensures our fullest possible participation in an open scholarly communication system.

*Musselman Library Strategic Plan 2013-2016

Related Guides and Pages