Radical Access: The SFU Scholarly Publishing blog

Scholarly Publishing and Open Access blog

The latest news and answers to your questions about scholarly publishing and open access.


Making Knowledge Public: Student reflections on the 2018 President’s Dream Colloquium

Published by Kate Shuttleworth

By Alice Fleerackers

Changing the academic system to be more accessible

“You shouldn’t have to pay a large sum of tuition to have access to basic information,” Melissa Roach says when I ask her what she’d like to change about our academic system. “It just creates layers of mediation between scholars, media and the public, and that disconnect can cause a lot of misunderstanding.” 

Can I publish my thesis?

Published by Jennifer Zerkee

Your Masters or PhD thesis is the result of years spent in study of a specific topic. It's no surprise that many grads would like to turn their thesis into an article, a series of articles, a book chapter or a monograph.

Do you have the right to do this? What are SFU's rights to your thesis? Will publishers want a work that is based on a thesis, especially once the thesis is publicly available in Summit?

Dear Distinguished Faculty: How to assess a call for papers and avoid predatory publishers

Published by Kate Shuttleworth

By Emily Guerrero, former SFU Reference Librarian.

One of the first steps in getting your work published, open or otherwise, is picking the journals to submit to. With predatory journals on the rise, it's becoming even more important to assess any call for papers that might come your way via email.

As you look at calls to publish, here are a few general rules to keep in mind: