You may be able to deposit your scholarship to Salve Regina University's institutional repository, Digital Commons. This makes the full-text of your work more accessible, can increase visibility of your work, and increase your citation counts. Google Scholar and other search engines index institutional repositories including Digital Commons.
Before submitting to Digital Commons, you should check to confirm that you have permission and that another organization does not hold the copyright to your work.
While Salve Regina University does not currently have an open access policy, there are benefits to worldwide community of scholars in making search widely accessible. If you would like to submit your research, please use the library's submission form.
Before depositing, you should confirm that you have copyright permission to deposit. Going forward, you may also want to request that your publishers allow deposit of final or at least pre-peer-review versions of your work.
For published journal articles books, book chapters, or conference papers:
If you have your publishing agreement, check the "rights retained by authors" section. Contact your publisher if you don't see information about institutional repositories or if the information is unclear.
If you don't have your publishing agreement, the SHERPA RoMEO Publisher copyright policies and self-archiving database has information about whether any versions of your work can be submitted (eg: submitted, pre-peer review version versus accepted, post peer reviewed). The journal publisher's website may also have information.
For preprints and unpublished conference papers:
You retain the copyright and can submit to Digital Commons. However, if you plan to submit to a journal, check with the publisher about whether submitting to an institutional repository would be considered prior publication.
For reports:
If your work was commissioned by an organization, author rights should be included in the contract. Otherwise contact the organization.
Anything published in Digital Commons should be considered "published" in terms of whether one can use other materials. Materials published to Digital Commons are publicly available to be downloaded and used. They may not be downloaded for "educational use" so the author cannot justify using copywritten materials without attribution and permission. It is best to use openly licensed, copyright-free photos, graphs, and other illustrative materials, but if this is not possible seek permission or create your own.