Make My Work Open

Links to the VOR can easily be included in the DRUM record. This is a common practice and often a requirement of the journal. Once an article has been deposited in DRUM, faculty members are not able to modify a record, but the Libraries have committed resources to adding or changing these links and providing CV-scraping services.

In the future, we hope to be able to harvest the papers that authors may upload to Faculty Success and deposit them in DRUM programmatically, eliminating the need for faculty to upload their articles more than once. But short of that for now, we will work on other techniques, such as CV-scraping services, library-assisted uploading of AAMs, etc., to minimize faculty burden related to this policy going forward.

The policy asks faculty members to submit an electronic version, usually a PDF, of their final, peer-reviewed Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) for inclusion in DRUM. A PDF (Persistent Document Format) is a very stable file format that we can make accessible and preserve. PDF documents help to make your work more discoverable because this file format can be crawled by made findable through major search engines.

UMD Libraries perform post-deposit quality checks and also provide education and training to faculty members who wish to learn about accessibility related to their articles.

When a paper is revised by the publisher after the peer review stage, the author generally does not have the rights to amy publisher-made changes. But the VOR is almost always the same, in regard to meaningful content, as the AAM. In most cases, the AAM suffices for scholarly purposes, because it is the peer-reviewed version of the text. One 2018 study by Kelin et al, “Comparing published scientific journal articles to their pre-print versions” (International Journal on Digital Libraries, 2018), found that “the text contents of the scientific papers generally changed very little from their pre-print to final published versions.” Even for those who would prefer access to the VOR, if they are barred from access due to permission and price barriers, access to the AAM is far better than nothing.

It is likely you have authored work not covered by the Equitable Access Policy. For example, anything authored before the date this policy was approved, or before you signed the voluntary Individual Equitable Access License — would not be covered by this policy. For scholarly articles not covered by a UMD license,  your rights to use those works may be limited by the terms of any agreements you signed with publishers or other third parties. In most cases,  publishing agreements grant more extensive reuse rights for the Author Accepted Manuscript than for the published version or Version of Record.

Therefore, even if the publisher does not permit you to distribute the published version, your publishing agreement may permit you to make your AAM available for download in DRUM. Please consult with Libraries’ Open Scholarship Team with any questions. 

We also invite you to share other research outputs through DRUM, beyond research articles. DRUM is an ideal place to share working papers, datasets, white papers, and any other research materials, including audiovisual materials, that you want to share openly and preserve for the scholarly record!

Yes, it is possible to embargo or restrict access to documents in DRUM for a finite period of time. Faculty members must contact the Libraries to set the end date. Restrictions are automatically removed at the end of the embargo period.

Email drum-help@umd.edu to request an embargo of your AAM in DRUM. 

UMD’s first priority is to make sure research is accessible in an open, equitable manner. Compliance with the Equitable Access Policy will not preclude you from sharing your work to any other repository, website, or publication, at the time that provides the most benefit to your research.