Publish Your Research
SMU Libraries actively supports faculty and researchers in sharing their scholarship more widely through comprehensive publishing assistance and copyright guidance. We partner with authors throughout the publishing process, offering funding and hands-on support to help share SMU scholarship openly while navigating copyright and protecting authors’ rights.
Author's Rights and Copyright
Publishing agreements can affect how you share and reuse your work. Whether you are preparing to sign a publishing agreement or determining how you can share a published article, our Author's Rights and Copyright guide can help you make informed decisions about your rights as an author.
SMU Libraries provides education and best practice guidelines to keep SMU faculty, students, and staff compliant with copyright law. These guides are intended for information purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. Our copyright team is available to answer specific questions.
Copyright law protects original works, balancing the creator’s rights with the public’s right to certain uses. Copyright gives the owner the exclusive rights to:
- Reproduce or copy the work,
- Create derivative works,
- Distribute copies to the public,
- Public performance or display, and
- Modification of the original work.
Open Access
Open access is a publishing model in which authors retain their rights to make scholarship available online for free, increasing its visibility and reuse.
SMU Libraries has agreements with several journal publishers to cover the Article Processing Charges (APCs) for SMU-affiliated authors’ articles to be made available open access, including:
- Cambridge University Press
- Company of Biologists, and
- IEEE
For journals outside these agreements, we have limited funds available for the Open Access Publishing Grant. The grant can be used to help pay APCs for Open Access articles, book chapters, or books that are not already covered by SMU Libraries’ publishing agreements. Your school or college may also have funds available for this purpose.
You may also be able to make pre- or post-prints available open access through SMU Scholar, our institutional repository.
Creative Commons Licensing
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization offering a variety of creative works freely available for legal use. Users can search the commons using Openverse to find shared content that can be repurposed or remixed. There are six CC license options that allow a variety of requirements and permissions including attribution, non-commercial use, and share alike.
Persistent Links
PermaCC is a service that creates permanent links to web content and ensures that material cited or published online by authors will always be accessible to readers. Contact the Research & Scholarly Initiatives team with questions or to sign up.