Open Access and Scholarly Communications

• Archive a copy of your work to share with others in the future.
• Get a permanent URL for your work that you can use in other web pages or course management systems.
• Increase your work’s visibility and citation impact.
• Fulfill grant requirements for for public access to your research.
• Get the Library to do the metadata and maintenance work – you have better things to do with your time.

When you first published your article, you may have signed a copyright transfer agreement with the journal's publisher.  If so, you may still be able to self-archive your articles in an institutional repository.  Sherpa-Romeo is a database of publishers' policies and conditions for self-archiving.

You can search by either the publisher or the journal that published your article and you will find their policy for permitting self-archiving.

Knowledge Commons is Lakehead University Library's online repository.  Knowledge Commons began as an e-theses repository and currently holds approximately 700 Lakehead theses.  Any Lakehead faculty member may deposit publications in Knowledge Commons as long as they are the copyright holder.

Knowledge Commons is considered to be an open access repository under the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications.  In addition to journal articles, other types of reports, white papers, presentation slides, images and sound files are welcome.

Knowledge Commons consists of 3 communities - Electronic theses and dissertations, Research and scholarly works and University publications.

You can search all three communities at once or select one.

You can search by:

• author (including both creators and contributors such as thesis advisors)
• title (exact title)
• subject

Knowledge Commons has an Advanced Search page that allow you to search the full-text of documents where possible.