Scholarly Communication

Promoting faculty scholarship to a global audience by creating a more sustainable and equitable academic publishing system.

The Trinity College Digital Repository is 10 Years Old! Celebrating faculty scholarship by the numbers:

Why Open Access?

Open Access (OA) is a common end goal among academic publishing stakeholders for good reason. And, the benefits for Trinity College’s participation in Open Access publishing are significant:

• OA works are more easily discoverable and cited more often, which raises the visibility of Trinity scholarship.
• Ensuring that Trinity research is widely accessible fits with Trinity’s focus on global engagement and commitment to equity.
• Our collective investment in sustainable academic publishing models today will ensure that tomorrow’s generation of Trinity students will continue to have access to the information they need. 
• Open Access allows faculty to connect and collaborate with their colleagues more quickly and easily, increasing their effectiveness and scholarly impact. 

How to publish work as Open Access and unlock your scholarship

A few ways to help ensure your scholarship reaches the widest audience:

• Publish your work in the journal of your choice, but deposit a post-print (author’s manuscript) copy in the Trinity College Digital Repository, which provides free web access beyond Trinity. Many journal publishers allow authors to upload a post-peer review manuscript copy of an article to their institution’s repository. Colleges and universities that have passed Open Access “policies” or “resolutions” typically promote this method of Open Access publishing. You can look up your publisher’s policies by searching the Sherpa/Romeo database.  then submit your work directly to the Digital Repository.
• Submit the work to an Open Access journal (Gold OA). Often, you will need to pay an article processing charge (APC) to publish the article, but sometimes the journal is independently funded by an academic society or several institutions so there is no cost to authors or subscribers. Use the Sherpa/Romeo database or the Directory of Open Access Journals to find reputable, peer-reviewed Open-Access publishers for your discipline.
• Submit the work to a hybrid journal. Many journals from the big publishers are hybrid, in that content within journal volumes can be either paywalled or open depending on whether authors have paid an APC. 
• Negotiate with your journal or monograph  publisher upfront to retain your copyrights. Read more about this from SPARC and use their Author Addendum with publishers.

Learn more

Here are some suggested readings on Open Access and some of the inherent equity issues in the financial models currently in use, particularly the author-pays model:

• An Introduction to Open Access (2019)
• Transformative Agreements, Funders, and the Publishing Ecosystem: A lack of Focus on Equity (2020)
• Equity concerns persist over open-access publishing (2021)

Faculty publications recently added to the Digital Repository

Trinity’s Institutional Repository is a digital archive that showcases and provides access to scholarly and creative works by Trinity College community members. Works in the Repository are open to anyone on or off campus, resulting in increased readership and visibility.

• Experimental Tests for Randomness of Quantum Decay Examined as a Markov Process [post-print]
  by Mark P. Silverman et al.
  The number of decays from four distinct nuclear disintegration processes were recorded over a long succession of counting intervals, converted into sequences of binary outcomes based on parity, and examined as a discrete two-state Markov process. The difference in single-step transition probabilities was found to be null to within an uncertainty of order 10−3, supporting […]
• Exact Statistical Distribution and Correlation of Human Height and Weight: Analysis and Experimental Confirmation
  by Mark P. Silverman
  The statistical relationship between human height and weight is of especial importance to clinical medicine, epidemiology, and the biology of human development. Yet, after more than a century of anthropometric measurements and analyses, there has been no consensus on this relationship. The purpose of this article is to provide a definitive statistical distribution function from […]
• Connection Meets Disruption: The China-Europe Freight Train and the War in Ukraine
  by Xiangming Chen
  The China-Europe Freight Train (CEFT), which inaugurated its run from the megacity of Chongqing in southwestern China to Europe’s largest river port of Duisburg in western Germany in 2011, has roared through its first decade. With 82 routes currently connecting nearly 100 Chinese cities and around 200 cities across 24 European countries and more than […]
• The Politics of Disorder: Reexamining Harlem's Riots of 1935 and 1943
  by Cheryl Greenberg
• Integration Versus Meritocracy? Competing Educational Goals During the COVID-19 Pandemic
  by Elise Castillo et al.
  Alongside the immediate challenges of operating schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, over the past year, parents, students, and policymakers around the country have also debated equity and access to some of the country’s most elite and segregated public schools. This qualitative case study examines how New York City activists conceptualized educational equity during the pandemic. […]
• Building Civic Capacity: The History & Landscape of NYC Integration Activism 2012–2021 [post-print]
  by Mira Debs et al.
  Background: New York City is one of the most segregated school districts in the country, but in the last nine years, school integration has moved from being marginal to a central education policy. Existing narratives have emphasized parents, school and political leaders, downplaying the significance of citywide coalitions of activists, especially youth activists. Purpose: We […]
• New Quantum Effect of Confined Magnetic Flux on Electrons [post-print]
  by Mark P. Silverman
  A charged particle analogue of the Hanbury Brown-Twiss experiments with photons is described wherein the correlation of electron intensity at two detectors is modulated by magnetic flux confined to a region from which the electrons are excluded. The experimental conditions differ substantially from those of the Aharonov-Bohm effect.
• Exact Statistical Distribution of the Body Mass Index (BMI): Analysis and Experimental Confirmation
  by Mark P. Silverman
  Body Mass Index (BMI), defined as the ratio of individual mass (in kilograms) to the square of the associated height (in meters), is one of the most widely discussed and utilized risk factors in medicine and public health, given the increasing obesity worldwide and its relation to metabolic disease. Statistically, BMI is a composite random […]
• Module bundles and module amenability
  by Terje Hill et al.
  Let X be a compact Hausdorff space, and let {Ax : x ∈ X} and {Bx : x ∈ X} be collections of Banach algebras such that each Ax is a Bx-bimodule. Using the theory of bundles of Banach spaces as a tool, we investigate the module amenability of certain algebras of Ax-valued functions on […]
• Flipping the Script: Community Initiated Urban Research with the Liberal Arts Action Lab
  by Jack Dougherty et al.
  At traditional academic research centers, faculty and graduate students make decisions on what topics to study. But the Liberal Arts Action Lab “flips the script” by empowering local residents of Hartford, Connecticut to drive this process. In this chapter we compile, analyze, and reflect on two years of data generated by Action Lab partnerships to […]