Humboldt Digital Scholar Frequently Asked Questions

Below are answers to some of the questions asked most frequently About Dspace Software. If you have a question which is not answered here, please contact the HDS Administrator.

1. Question:

Doesn't posting my research in Humboldt Digital Scholar violate the copyright agreements that I have with the journals that publish my articles?

Answer:

As an author, you retain copyright to materials that you submit to Humboldt Digital Scholar unless you have signed that copyright away to another person or company. More and more publishers are recognizing authors' rights to post preprints of their work online, and many also allow authors to make post-prints available online. This is true even of some of the largest commercial publishers and many society publishers. If you would like to know where your publisher stands on this issue, visit the Sherpa Web site at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php. You may already have permission to post your work in Humboldt Digital Scholar without having to negotiate any special agreement with your publisher.

2. Question:

Is Humboldt Digital Scholar different from or better than my own web site?

Answer:

Humboldt Digital Scholar allows you to make your research or scholarship widely available with little effort. Using a simple submission form through which you can upload files, you are able in a few minutes to make your research available, register it as your intellectual property, provide indexing and abstracts that can be searched or harvested, make it available through a web interface, guarantee that your materials will be preserved and migrated to new formats as needed, and provide a simple url that facilitates citation of your work. You submit the material and the Library and the software take care of the rest.

3. Question:

Who determines what may be deposited in Humboldt Digital Scholar? Who sets the standards?

Answer:

Materials submitted should be of a scholarly nature, and should be the intellectual property of the author. Otherwise, it is the responsibility of a collection to set standards for the material that authors may contribute. In setting up the infrastructure for a collection, the Libraries will consult with collection representatives about specific policies and access restrictions. It is up to a collection liaison to communicate standards to individual authors.

4. Question:

How does Humboldt Digital Scholar differ from a discipline-specific archive?

Answer:

Materials submitted to Humboldt Digital Scholar will be identified as being part of Humboldt State University’s scholarly output. Because Humboldt Digital Scholar includes materials from many disciplines, there is potentially wider dissemination of your scholarship and a greater possibility of cross-disciplinary collaboration than might occur through a discipline-specific archive. And Humboldt Digital Scholar charges no fees for deposit or access to its content.

5. Question:

Who has access to material stored in Humboldt Digital Scholar? What materials are restricted, why, and to whom?

Answer:

Individual Collections set the policies regarding access to materials. The Libraries will work with a Collection’s representative(s) to set up the necessary infrastructure in support of those policies. The software allows contributors to limit access to items in Humboldt Digital Scholar. See Access Restrictions or contact HDS Administrator for more information.

6. Question:

How do I establish a Collection?

Answer:

Individual faculty, academic departments, or programs may establish a collection by contacting the Humboldt Digital Scholar Administrator to discuss the types of materials to be submitted, the average size of individual files, whether or not the Collection will have restrictions on who can access the materials within it, whether there are multiple collections needed for the community, and who will be handling the actual submissions.

7. Question:

How do I submit materials to Humboldt Digital Scholar?

Answer:

If you are authorized to submit materials to a Collection in Humboldt Digital Scholar, follow the instructions available on the Submit to HDS page. If you are not, or for additional assistance, contact HDS Administrator.

8. Question:

Can I make changes to an item once I’ve deposited it into HDS?

Answer:

No, Humboldt Digital Scholar does not support versioning. You can submit both a preprint and a postprint, if you wish.

9. Question:

How do I decide which terms to use to describe my submission?

Answer:

Each Collection may set its own standards regarding the use of specific terms to be used to describe individual submissions. The Library recommends the use of a list of controlled terms to improve the precision of searching within a collection, but there are no requirements for using such a list. If you would like assistance in this area, please contact the HDS Administrator.

10. Question:

Can I link to my papers in HDS from my own web site?

Answer:

Yes. We will provide you with a persistent URL for that purpose.

11. Question:

Can I withdraw items?

Answer:

Under special circumstances, you can withdraw items from HDS. Please contact HDS Administrator for details.

12. Question:

What is open access and how does it relate to Humboldt Digital Scholar?

Answer:

An open access publication is one that meets the following two conditions:

1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual (for the lifetime of the applicable copyright) right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, perform and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any reasonable purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving.*

Humboldt Digital Scholar is a repository which supports the open access publishing model. As such, it is a fundamental step in transforming scholarly communication and providing more comprehensive access to research for scholars everywhere.

*(Definition taken from "A position statement by the Wellcome Trust in support of open access publishing" at: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD002766.html and the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" at: http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html)