IUScholarWorks Repository FAQ for Submitters

What is the IUScholarWorks Repository?

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. The Repository's mission is to expand the dissemination and ensure long-term preservation of IU scholarship. All material deposited in the Repository is, by default, open to the world.

Who may deposit their scholarly materials into the Repository?

All Indiana University researchers are eligible to deposit their scholarly materials 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 the Repository 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 the Repository 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?

Repository documents that have text components (e.g. Word, PDF documents) are searched full-text by the Repository search engine 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 the Repository?

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 Repository page.

What rights do readers have to my works?

The purpose of the IUScholarWorks Repository is to provide open access to IU scholarship to researchers throughout the world, via the internet. By default, materials deposited into the Repository are open access, which means anyone on the web can access them. In addition, Repository 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 the Repository that are licensed under Creative Commons licenses will display the license conditions.

Who may remove a file from the Repository?

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 the IUScholarWorks Repository 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/