Scholarly Communication

The final phase of the scholarly communication lifecycle is discovery and dissemination. Archiving your work in an institutional or disciplinary repository enhances the accessibility of your research. Archived works can include scholarship created in any phase of the scholarship lifecycle, such as: pre/post-prints, data-sets, conference proceedings, theses/dissertations, and software. ASU has an institutional account with Open Science Framework (OSF), which provides a storage and sharing platform for data and publications - you can log in with your ASURITE and password to get started. Additionally, ASU Library's KEEP repository and Research Data repository are your institutional home for scholarship and data.

Many federal funding agencies and other research sponsors have policies which require published articles and/or accompanying data to be publicly or openly available as a condition of funding. Self-archiving your work in the appropriate repository satisfies most of these requirements. 

For more detailed information about different types of repositories, as well as policies which facilitate self-archiving, view the Open Access: OA Repositories page.

General Repositories and Resources

This list includes indexes of repositories, as well as useful information regarding policies from publishers, funders and institutions that enable posting your work in a repository.

Institutional Repositories

Institutional repositories are digital collections managed by a university or research organization. ASU Library's KEEP Institutional Repository supports open access, allowing for the discovery of the creative and scholarly output of the ASU community.

Disciplinary Repositories

Discipline or subject repositories are online archives designed to preserve, organize, and disseminate research either centered on a single discipline (e.g biology or physics) or multi-disciplinary (e.g. life sciences or humanities). Material is deposited by researchers throughout the world to be freely accessible with limited restrictions.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum, "Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research" on August 25th, 2022 directing all federal agencies to update their public access policies and require all federally funded research to be free and immediately accessible. This expands on the 2013 Memorandum, which only required certain federal agencies to provide publicly accessible research and data within 12 months of publication. The updated guidance now requires any research that receives federal funding to be freely accessible without a delay. Agencies with research and development expenditures of at least $100 million annually will submit their initial public access plan updates by February 21, 2023. Agencies with smaller research and development expenditures will have until August 20, 2023. All federal agencies must have updated plans in place by December 31st, 2025. Further guidance on this will be forthcoming, and researchers who receive federal funding may reach out to us with questions about making their publications and data freely accessible. 

Here are some resources to help stay informed.

A data management plan (DMP) is a written document that describes the data you expect to acquire or generate during the course of a research project, how you will manage, describe, analyze, and store those data, and what mechanisms you will use at the end of your project to share and preserve your data.  Data management is best addressed in the early stages of a research project, but it is never too late to develop a data management plan.

For guidance or to arrange a consultation for developing a DMP, review the Research Data Management library guide.