Digital Scholarship

Authoring

Publishing Strategy 

Wesleyan University Press is happy to help faculty, staff, and students identify the most efficient means of disseminating their work, either through the development of in-house products or through referrals to other publishers or units on campus. We are also available to review your publishing agreement. For a no-commitment conversation about your publishing needs, please contact Suzanna Tamminen, Director and Editor in Chief, at X7727.

Campus E-Journal Platform

The campus institutional repository, WesScholar, provides manuscript management workflows and tools for the production of conference/workshop proceedings, journals, and collections of digital scholarship. These systems make it easy to accept online submissions, administer a review system, and collect appropriate intellectual property licenses. Access to this infrastructure is free-of-charge to the Wesleyan community. To see a demo, please contact Leith Johnson (University Archivist, ljohnson@wesleyan.edu) or Dan Schnaidt (dschnaidt@wesleyan.edu). 

Informal and Self-Publishing Platforms

There is a digital dimension to virtually all publishing today. Beyond the obvious electronic media—the music and movies we take for granted, the increasingly indispensable web, and eBooks—almost everything we read, even on paper, was produced digitally. This new digital world offers a steadily increasing number of choices, and it is changing nature of scholarly communication. Digital scholarship can be published to the web with free, easy-to-learn tools/platforms.

iBooks Author: Apple's iBooks author is easy to use and makes it possible for anyone to create beautiful interactive digital books, including e-textbooks. However, the licensing agreement requires you to distribute your work exclusively through the iBookstore and interactive is platform-dependent.

WordPress: A multi-user web publishing platform that can be used as a blog or website. Maintained by Wesleyan. Faculty can contact their Academic Computing Manager for assistance setting up a WordPress blog.

Scalar: An online publishing platform for "born-digital" resources; oriented toward visual media, archival research. Open source (free).

Omeka: An easy-to-use web-based platform that provides templates and timeline interfaces for presenting maps, images, and documents as curated exhibits.  Wesleyan ITS supports local instances of Omeka. Faculty can contact their Academic Computing Manager to learn more. 

Copyright Advice 

Wesleyan University’s guidelines for the use of intellectual property—in the classroom and outside the classroom, are available here http://www.wesleyan.edu/ip/

The Library Liasions and Academic Computing Managers can provide information on copyright and author's rights issues, emphasizing the importance of understanding “fair use” exemptions and retaining author rights. We advocate for best practices that balance author interests with publishers’ legitimate needs to sustain their activities. Copyright research is the responsibility of the author or publisher.

Helpful links:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

https://copyright.cornell.edu/policies/