IUScholarWorks FAQ
for Submitters
What is IUScholarWorks?
IUScholarWorks is a suite of services from the IU Libraries
and the Digital Library Program that enables IU scholars and academic units to
make their scholarly materials accessible to the world, at a stable URL, and
with the assurance they will be maintained over the long term. IUScholarWorks
mission is to expand the dissemination and ensure long-term preservation of IU
scholarship. All material deposited in IUScholarWorks is, by default, open to
the world.
Who may deposit their scholarly materials into
IUScholarworks?
All Indiana University researchers are eligible to deposit
their scholarly materials into IUScholarWorks through their research unit,
institute, center, or department (or any unit associated with these groups). Individual
faculty members whose departments do not have a Community in IUScholarWorks may
deposit their material into the Faculty Research Community, and graduate
students may deposit their dissertations. Researchers affiliated with IU may place
their works in IUScholarWorks if a sponsoring unit within IU decides that the
content is appropriate for submission and has permission from the rights-holder.
How does IUScholarWorks make my work discoverable?
IUScholarWorks documents that have text components (e.g.
Word, PDF documents) are searched full-text by IUScholarWorks and by general search
engines such as Google. In addition, more precise searching is accomplished by
metadata records; (descriptive cataloging information such as title, author,
citation information, subject keywords, etc.) The terms entered into the
metadata record by the submitter enable specialized search tools as well as
Google to find documents much more effectively than full-text searching alone.
What kinds of materials are appropriate for
IUScholarWorks?
The academic units decide what content to put into their
IUScholarWorks Community. IUScholarWorks is designed to hold and deliver
scholarly materials in digital form (text, data, image, etc.), that will not
change over time and that are adequately described with standard keywords and
descriptors (i.e., do not have specialized metadata requirements).
Examples of content:
Peer-reviewed materials (pre- or post-print, if rights
retained)
Supplementary materials
Gray literature (conference papers, working papers, primary
evidence)
Dissertations and theses
Negative results or work that will not be finished
Student research (with permission of student)
What formats are supported?
The system will accept any file format, though support for
some formats is more robust than others. Indiana University will work to
preserve as many of these file formats as possible. The service is not
equipped to support the archiving and/or accessibility of dynamic resources
like open web sites, interactive applications, files with complex metadata
requirements, streaming audio or video, authoring tools, or dynamic learning
objects.� For more specific information about file formats, please see the Help menu on the main IUScholarWorks page.
What rights do readers have to my works?
The purpose of IUScholarWorks is
to provide open access to IU scholarship to researchers throughout the world,
via the internet. By default, materials deposited into IUScholarWorks are open
access, which means anyone on the web can access them. In addition,
IUScholarWorks materials are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved
by the copyright holder. As an alternative to reserving all rights, authors are
encouraged to consider licensing their works under a Creative Commons
License, under which they can
preserve those rights that are most important to them (e.g., proper
attribution,) and at the same time explicitly grant to readers certain other
rights chosen by the author to be used at the readers discretion (e.g., copy,
distribute, display, or perform the work.) Documents in IUScholarWorks that are
licensed under Creative Commons licenses will display the license conditions.
Who may remove a file from IUScholarWorks?
Only under extraordinary circumstances will documents submitted to IUScholarWorks Repository be removed. Please direct inquiries to iusw@indiana.edu and an IUScholarWorks staff member will respond to discuss the situation and suggest the best action. In addition, the IU Libraries and Indiana University retain the right to withdraw any item from the Repository if they deem such action necessary. In these cases, an attempt to notify the author will be made to apprise them of the situation.
In order to avoid the loss of the historical record for items withdrawn from the repository, the system will display a substitute citation for any withdrawn item noting that the item by this person, published on a specific date, with this title, and with this specific URL has been removed, thereby leaving a ‘tombstone’ record. This will ensure that the URL never disappears even though the actual item has been withdrawn.
What software does IUScholarWorks use?
IUScholarWorks is built on DSpace,
which is freely available open source software jointly developed by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Labs as a solution for creating various kinds of digital repositories. DSpace is developed in
Java, using Java Servlet technology and Java Server Pages, and uses the PostgreSQL relational
database to store the metadata. The document objects are stored as bitstreams on disk, and both the metadata and document text are indexed
and searched via the Apache Lucene text search engine. Persistent identifiers to items are provided
by the CNRI Handle system.
IUScholarWorks is currently hosted on IBM eServer pSeries server hardware running version 5.1 of the IBM AIX operating system, and is served
using the open source Tomcat
application server and Apache HTTP Server software. The IBM eServer has 4GB of memory, and is
attached to external storage devices that allow for flexible allocation of disk space to the IUScholarWorks asset store.
Do other universities have digital repositories?
Yes, there are hundreds around the world. Examples:
University of Kansas - KU ScholarWorks:
http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/
University of California system - EScholarship:
http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (DSpace: http://dspace.mit.edu/
Oxford University (Oxford EPrints http://eprints.ouls.ox.ac.uk/
OpenDOAR directory of Open Access Repositories (http://www.opendoar.org/