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ScientificCommons.org Questions, Answers & Support

What do we mean by "missing certification"?

If you are looking how to get your personal web resource included: We do not index them at all at the moment.
This has two major reasons.

1. Certification
   We assume that institutional repositories, whether they are on university, institutional or even journal level, provide a certain degree of quality control for the content they publish in their digital repositories/archives. This helps us to prevent spam and to provide you with high quality scientific content.
2. Promote Self-Archiving
   Further more we would like to promote Open Access and the Open Archive Initiate. Therefore we would like to motivate scientific institutions to routinize self-archiving their scientific work and to make it as accessible as possible.

Why should I self-archive?

You should self-archive for two reason:

1. Communication of your scholarly work
   Research needs to be communicated otherwise it doesn't qualifies as research!
2. Improve your citation index
   Self-Archiving leads two more visibility of your scholarly work, which potentially leads to more downloads and correlates with later citations. Self-archived Open Access publications get up to 25%-300% more citations then regular published publications depending on the quality. If you want to know more read the paper about Open Access by Carr et. al. (2006).

Am I allowed to self-archive my Journal Article?

Well pretty easy to answer. Check the Directory of Open Access Journals whether the journal you are about to publish your paper in allows self-archiving or not. Currently more than 90% of the scientific journals available permit self-archiving. In case they don't permit this just add the "OpenAccess-CreativeCommons 1.0 Addendum" when signing and returning the copyright transfer agreement. This saves you the right to self-archive. If they still deny to do so change the publisher as this limits the dissemination of your scientific work and therefor the impact!