Benefits and considerations for posting honors theses and other scholarship in Wheaton's Digital Repository
Benefits of Digital Access:
- Continual access for the author and others, any time and any place -- no longer limited to the open hours of the Gebbie Archives where the bound theses are kept.
- Centralized online location
- Provides a convenient, single online location to which future researchers can refer
- Visibility
- Increases the likelihood that the work will be discovered by others in diverse locations, thus increasing the visibility of students and their work, potentially leading to improved job prospects or graduate school placement for students.
- Knowledge-sharing
- Potentially an effective way of sharing original research both across and beyond the academy, regardless of format.
- Preservation
- Reduce wear and tear of copying on frequently requested theses. Ensures access into the future.
Considerations for Restricting Access:
- Controlled access -- the following options pertain:
- Closed access, partial -- We will close access to portions of a work consisting of third-party copyrighted material when no owner permissions have been obtained.
- Closed access, total (only author, title, abstract for the work are available)-- We will close access when issues of future publication, privacy, or copyright are relevant.
- Access to Wheaton community only (via WID/password)
- Future Publication
Will the thesis or work be accepted for or data be used in publication later and are publication and/or grant proposal submissions compromised by posting first in DSpace? - If a thesis is substantially revised, this may not be the case. Be particularly careful when data involving faculty work is involved.
- Consult potential publisher policies: some allow posting pre-prints while others do not. The ACS explicitly prohibits posting in a repository for their publications; biology can be restrictive; physics, less so. Policies are posted on publisher web sites. SHERPA/RoMEO provides summaries of publisher permissions. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php
- Students producing original creative work, such as music, art, plays, video, short stories or novellas, should carefully consider controlled access options.
- Privacy
- Research that includes private information about individuals, including images, should carefully consider controlled access options.
- Copyright
- Authors retain copyright to their work.
- Increasingly, publishers permit authors to retain copyright to their work and to store digital copies of articles on institutional web sites.
- Refer to the following web sites for guidance about retaining copyright and control of works submitted for publication:
- ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit: http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/scholarlycomm/scholarlycommunicationtoolkit/toolkit.cfm
- Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC): http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/index.shtml
Questions? Contact Margaret Gardner, Zeph Stickney, or Deryl Freeman
This page is maintained by Mason Brown. Last updated on 4/17/09.
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