University of Houston Libraries

Even if you have signed over full copyright to an article or some other research product, it is likely that the publisher's copyright policies allow for a version of that product to be made available in an open access repository, like Cougar ROAR.

For an article, consult Sherpa/RoMEO, a public database that provides information about the copyright policies, open access, and self-archiving policies of publishers. This is an excellent source of information about specific publisher's copyright policies, and can be useful if an author needs to know, before or after signing a copyright agreement, what rights he or she will/has retained. Use this Sherpa/RoMEO link to find publishers that allow for the deposit of a final published version in Institutional Repositories.

For other pieces of published research, consult your publisher agreement or any publicly available copyright policies to see what terms they articulate around making your work available open access.

UH Libraries manages two open access digital repositories (collectively called Cougar ROAR) that allow UH authors to share their published research online in a way that is legal, safe, secure, and free. Both digital repositories are free and available of use by any UH community member with a valid CougarNet ID and password.

The UH Institutional Repository is a safe and permanent destination for scholarly articles, audio and video files, posters, presentations, and other research products. UH community members can easily submit their scholarship by logging into the repository using their CougarNet credentials and clicking the "Start a submission" button on the repository homepage.

UH Dataverse is a specialized digital repository built for the long-term storage of data sets.

Detailed information about both repositories, including step-by-step submission processes, policies, and formatting guidelines, can be found here.

Benefits of depositing your research in Cougar ROAR:

• Wider dissemination and citation of your work (not limited to journal subscribers; see citation impact chart below)
• Increased potential for your publications to be cited by others
• Ability to upload associated content (datasets, video/audio files, etc.)
• Permanent URL that will not change or suffer "link rot"
• Results of your research collected in one place
• Accessible from any computer at any location

ROAR deposits are indexed in Google, Google Scholar, and other search engines and harvesters - both popular and more scholarly - making them highly visible to any web user conducting a search in your field of expertise.

The following chart indicates the relative citation impact of articles published in 2016 in traditional (non-Open Access, paywalled) journals vs. those published in "Gold" Open Access journals vs. those articles made available by their authors in "Green" Open Access digital repositories.