CUNY Academic Works

Academic Works is City Tech and CUNY's institutional repository. It is our showcase for our scholarship, creative works, and more.  

Increase the readership of your scholarship and how often your work is cited! CUNY Academic Works is a new platform to make your scholarship available to a wider audience of scholars and the general public.

As an academic author, you have more rights than you think. Most journal publishers allow you to self-deposit (upload) your work into a university institutional repository. CUNY’s institutional repository is Academic Works.

How does this work? It’s easy to create an account with CUNY Academic Works. Once you have set up your account, consult your CV, and check the policies of the journals you have published in at SHERPA RoMEO, a website devoted to providing this information. Publishers usually allow you to self-deposit a version of your article, typically the final, accepted manuscript after peer-review, often available for you to share within a half-year after publication.

The more often your work is read, the more often it is cited. Your article in Academic Works is easily found by Google Scholar. More importantly, now readers can get access to your article without restriction. Academic Works provides all contributors with monthly reports of how often your articles are downloaded, a great benefit that documents the impact of your work.

In addition to preserving your work, possibilities for collaboration open up when your work is more accessible. Academic Works showcases the scholarly and creative work of City Tech faculty, providing a bird’s eye view of our collective accomplishments. Here is a flowchart to show the big picture:

Accepted manuscript (AM) (also called author accepted manuscript (AAM) or postprint)
The version of an article, book chapter, or conference paper after peer review and revision and before copyediting and proofs. Usually the accepted manuscript is in MSWord but it may also be a PDF. Any version bearing the publisher's watermark or logo or a digital object identifier is NOT an accepted manuscript. Authors are encouraged when working with a journal or book publisher to carefully name their files in order to identify their accepted manuscript. If your accepted manuscript is only in a publisher's portal, contact us for help. Here is an example of an accepted manuscript in Academic Works.

This illustration clarifies the language in your publisher's agreement or copyright transfer regarding versions:

"Open Access Support: Green Open Access" by Erica Finch, Utah State University is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

Authors rights
Most publishers allow authors to self-archive and some also allow authors to self-archive the published version of their work!
When an author transfers copyright to a publisher, they still retain certain rights including the right to add their scholarship to Academic Works. The copyright transfer will address self-archiving and may provide other guidance related to your rights. If you no longer have your copyright transfer agreement, it is easy to look up a journal or publisher's policy using SHERPA RoMEO or just reach out for help.

Before you transfer your copyright, you can negotiate for more rights to self-archive your work using the SPARC Addendum.

Embargo
A waiting period until your content can be downloaded by readers. Embargo periods are set by commercial publishers. Some commercial publishers do not require embargo periods for their content. Consult SHERPA RoMEO for details or contact us for help.

Green open access
Self-archiving is sometimes called green open access. It refers to an authors right to share their work in a repository. When an author publishes their scholarship and it is immediately available, that is called gold open access. 

Institutional Repository
Most colleges and universities (and research centers) have an institutional repository like Academic Works. Institutional repositories serve to showcase and preserve the scholarly and creative output of a college or university.

Self-archiving
Self-archiving refers to when an author adds their content to a repository. Repositories include preprint and subject-oriented repositories, for example, arXiv for physics. Academic Works is an institutional repository for CUNY and each college including City Tech.