Additional Components

You’ve completed community review, and all comments have been addressed. You’ve got a near-complete draft! Now consider additional components that you want to include in your publication. You will need to start gathering them soon in order to have them ready to go when it’s time you publish. These components are important to discuss with the group.

Authors’ note

The authors’ note should describe the authors’ context and, if applicable, their community of practice. Who are you? Tell them a little about how you got started on the research inquiry or what the motivation was for developing the resource. If you are publishing within a certain community of practice, explain that. If you are a rag tag bunch of misfits with no masters and no central home, still explain that!

If you aren’t transparent about who you are, people might get the wrong idea. Are these authors secretly employees of a business peddling a software they mentioned somewhere in the publication? Are they part of a special exclusive club? These perceptions can be hedged with an authors’ note. For further transparency, add a contact pathway.

The authors’ note can go in the front matter of the publication, or as part of the introduction. In this guidebook, I included my contextual author’s note in the Introduction.

Data management plan

Consider including your data management plan as a secondary attachment to your publication. If your repository doesn’t have the functionality to relate a separate data management plan to your publication, consider adding a section to the front matter of your publication that briefly describes the plan.

Sustainability plan

Not everything has to be a never-ending project, but practices change and sometimes we want to make room for the changing nature of our work. Share any sustainability or feedback plans for updating the document, including where readers can go to provide additional feedback. Consider how you will take further comments or requests for review or even removal as previous good practices or ideas become superceded by better ones, particularly if your research is entering a new area. Levels of Born-Digital Access is an example of a publication with a sustainability plan.

Your group may not feel that it is necessary to update the document over time, fully accepting that what felt true and right today will change over time. Some authors mark the moment-in-time-ness of their work in a similar type of note. As the Examples of Born Digital Description in Finding Aids project states on its home page, “This is a snapshot of practices and is not intended to change or update over time.”

Contact pathway

Regardless of whether you intend to update the work, you should still consider a way for people to provide feedback. Don’t assume the feedback you receive will always be criticism. You may hear notes of thanks for the work and gain insights about who is using the work and how.

You do not have to share specific contact information, like an email address, to provide a contact pathway. In Levels of Born-Digital Access, the authors direct readers to submit feedback to the current coordinators of the Born-Digital Access Working Group, who can be found on the DLF BDAWG web page.

Acknowledgements

Honor at least two groups of contributors in your acknowledgements. Acknowledge these people in separate sections.

1. Co-authors who wrote and edited the publication
2. Everyone who commented during the community review period

Who else helped? There may be others who have contributed to the project beyond the writers and community editors, like subject matter experts or professional association staff. “Decentralized Infrastructure for (Neuro)Science” is an excellent model for how to honor all the different contributions that go into a paper.

License

Many self-publishers use Creative Commons (CC) licenses to license their work. There are currently six options for CC licenses, which you can review on the Creative Commons website. Further guidance is found across many academic library LibGuides, for example the University at Buffalo’s Creative Commons Basics guide.

For example, this publication has a CC BY-SA license. This means that anyone can use it, but they must give credit to the creator, and their adaptation must be shared under the same license, CC BY-SA. CLIR publishes their Pocket Burgundy series with CC BY-NC-SA licenses, adding a requirement that only noncommercial uses of the product are permitted.

CC is not the only licensing option, but it is a fairly common one for self-published work.^[1] Discuss licensing options among the team and choose one together.

Citations

Choose a citation style together, or assign this job to someone in the group. The method of citation doesn’t really matter, but citing your sources and providing credit to the knowledge that came before you is very important. Different disciplines have preferred citation methods. Purdue OWL is a good resource for APA (American Psychological Association) and MLA (Modern Language Association) styles, and the Chicago Manual of Style is also available online. Tracking citations in Zotero can make building the bibliography a quick task at the end of the project.

Credit all images used throughout the publication, and follow any use policies available on images that you use. See the cover page section for more information.

Repository Metadata

Consider what metadata you will need for depositing the publication and minting a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), based on the repository you have chosen. Most open access repositories include few requirements for metadata, but have options for enhanced description and context for your work. You will need to craft some new information such as an abstract or summary and tags, and you may need to coordinate additional information from authors. Some common metadata to include in open access publications is:

• List of co-authors, with co-authors linked to their ORCID
• A description of the publication
• License
• Tags or subjects
• Funding or institutional host acknowledgement