Scholarly Publishing

Many publishers now allow authors to deposit a pre-print version or the accepted (post peer-review) version of their article into an institutional repository like the Tufts Digital Library or a disciplinary archive. This increases impact and visibility, as it allows all readers to access the article regardless of their access to subscription resources. You can also share unpublished scholarship such as conference papers, working papers, and teaching materials.

• Institutional repositories: Tufts faculty, researchers, students and staff can deposit scholarship into the Tufts Digital Library (TDL) in order to make it more widely available and to preserve it in context with other Tufts scholarship. Find out more about contributing articles and other scholarship.
• Disciplinary repositories: Disciplinary repositories are open to authors from across institutions and focus on scholarship in a particular subject area. The Open Access Directory maintains a list of disciplinary repositories, or get in touch with us for assistance in locating an appropriate repository for your work.

What is a DOI?

A digital object identifier (DOI) is a unique and permanent identifier assigned to a digital object such as a journal article, book, book chapter, report, or dataset. It typically looks like: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jort.2020.100310.

Why get a DOI?

A DOI is intended to point to a digital object for its entire lifetime, even if the object itself moves to a new location. For example, if you are hosting a series of reports on your research center’s website and the URL changes, future readers won’t be able to access the reports using that URL. With a DOI, they will continue to be available. Because of this, DOIs improve citation, sharing, and discovery of your work. Having a DOI can also add a higher level of authenticity to a publication.  

DOI services at Tufts

Tisch Library assigns DOIs by request to scholarly material created by the Tufts community that is not assigned a DOI elsewhere by a publisher. We register our DOIs through the DataCite community.

Types of work you may request a DOI for include (but are not limited to):

• Reports published by a research group or project
• White papers
• Monographs, open textbooks, or edited volumes
• Scholarly digital projects
• Manuals

We do not provide DOIs for material created in the process of earning a degree, such as theses & dissertations, capstones, coursework, etc.

If you need a DOI for a dataset that you’ve created, you can deposit the dataset in Tufts Dataverse or a disciplinary repository to receive a DOI. Find out more on our Research Data Management guide.

To receive a DOI, your material should be:

• Written by a Tufts-affiliated author or be published by a Tufts office, center, or research group
• Scholarly in nature and intended to be read & cited beyond the Tufts community
• Not published anywhere else
• Able to be deposited into the Tufts Digital Library (this is where the DOI will point)
  • Digital projects on a live website may get a DOI even if they can't be deposited into the Tufts Digital Library, but should be able to be crawled by Archive-It to create an archived copy. If the live site goes down in the future, the DOI will then point to the archived copy.

How to request a DOI

To request a DOI for your material, contact Andrea Schuler. Eligible material will be added into the Tufts Digital Library (or crawled by Archive-It, for digital projects) and given a DOI that points to it there.

Best practice is to include the DOI directly on your publication, so you can also get in touch with us before you’ve finalized your publication and we can reserve a DOI for you. You can then include the DOI on your final publication, and once we add your material to the Tufts Digital Library we will activate the DOI.

The platforms listed below aren't supported through Tufts, but offer free digital publishing tools and platforms. We can help you determine if one of these might be appropriate for your project.

For further publishing platform and/or tool options, including those that have a cost or require you to host your own materials, browse the resources below:

Prevent link rot in your citations!

Perma.cc is a service that creates an archived copy of a webpage and generates a permanent URL for the page. This ensures that if you later cite or refer to that page, there is a copy available that shows the information on the page exactly as you viewed it. Even if the page later changes or disappears entirely, your version archived with Perma.cc will remain.

Authors or publishers may choose to include Perma links with webpages cited in their works, ensuring that future readers can access them. The Chicago Manual of Style, for example, recommends using Perma.cc as a way to "Preserve a Permanent Record".

Tufts is a Perma.cc partner, which allows our users to create unlimited links for non-commercial scholarly and research purposes. Links must be freely available on the Internet to the general public and be cited in a legal work or work of scholarship. Find out more in the Perma.cc user guide.

Groups such as labs, research groups, or university publications can request an account for their group within the larger Tufts account, and individual authors/researchers can request to be added as affiliated users of the Tufts account. To set up an account to use Perma.cc, or for any questions, contact Andrea Schuler.

Visit our Research Data Management guide to find resources for sharing data associated with your scholarly publications.