Scholarly Communications, Copyright, & Publishing Services

We help Claremont Colleges scholars navigate the changing landscape of scholarly publishing, open access, and research output metrics. Our goal is to help Claremont Colleges students, faculty, and staff maximize the reach and impact of their work and understand their rights to use and share their work on scholarly communication platforms.

“Scholarly Communication” is the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs. Scholarly communication is frequently defined or depicted as a lifecycle documenting the steps involved in the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of a piece of scholarly research.

“Open Publishing” is an umbrella term for the scholarship known as open access, open data, open educational resources, open research, and open science. The Claremont Colleges Library has a longstanding commitment to open scholarship aimed at increasing sustainable systems of open infrastructure and open access for barrier-free use and re-use of scholarly works.

The Library’s Scholarly Communication Vision

We advocate for a scholarly communications landscape that is open, inclusive, and sustainable. The Library endeavors to extend the impact of the scholarship produced and consumed by members of The Claremont Colleges. By providing infrastructure, education, expertise, and services that support the processes involved in reviewing, collecting, organizing, disseminating, and preserving scholarly knowledge.

The Library’s Scholarly Communication Core values:

• Education & Advocacy: We seek to improve the quality and sustainability of the scholarly communications system through advocacy, professional development, and the adoption of shared best practices.
• Openness: We believe that the products and processes of scholarly communication should be as open as possible, thereby increasing the reach and impact of scholarship worldwide.
• Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion: We recognize the unique role of the library in scholarly communication practices and thus the unique opportunity to amplify underrepresented voices and scholarship.
• Social Justice:  We actively work to reduce systemic biases and injustice in academia, publishing, and librarianship.
• Collaboration: We leverage our collective knowledge and available resources (labor, money, infrastructure, time, people)  to sustain and enhance our scholarly communications efforts to support the contributions of faculty, students, and staff.
• Excellence & Innovation: As research practices and the scholarly communication ecosystem continue to evolve, we explore, educate others about, and engage with new technologies and new models of scholarship to better support the needs of the scholarly community, thereby achieving excellence in scholarly communication continuously through reflection and assessment.
• Transparency: We endeavor to build trust by being open about our operations and practices, and we encourage the organizations with which we collaborate to do the same.
• Sustainability: We prioritize a scholarly communications system that provides a viable long-term social, economic, and technical infrastructure. We aspire to leverage replicable and scalable tools and services to support the sustainability of common scholarship activities on campus.

The Claremont Colleges Library can assist faculty, students, and staff with:

• Open Access Publishing:
  • Announcement: 2022 OSTP Memo and Federal Public Access Policies
    On August 25, 2022, Dr. Alondra Nelson of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a memo, “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,” directing all federal agencies to update or create policies ensuring that publicly-funded research publications and data are freely and immediately available.
    Between now and January 1, 2026, agencies will develop and implement agency-specific policies promising wide-ranging implications for scholarly publishing and research data management and sharing. This guide will expand to track agency-specific policies and compliance resources as they become available.
    See OSTP “Nelson Memo” Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).
• Scholarship@Claremont (Institutional Repository)
• ORCiD unique researcher identifiers, a platform for sharing comprehensive, validated researcher data about their education, funding, works and publications, peer review activities, professional associations, invited positions and distinctions, and more.
• Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons Resources
• Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others.

For additional assistance please contact the Digital Scholarship team.