Lauinger Library has created the following procedural document and policy statement pertaining to various aspects of managing the DigitalGeorgetown Institutional Repository. Please email digitalscholarship@georgetown.edu if you have questions about the repository or these policies.
Depositing work on DigitalGeorgetown
Georgetown faculty, researchers, centers, and staff are eligible to publish on DigitalGeorgetown (DG). For submission instructions see this page: Submission Instructions. For more information on DG more generally see this page: DigitalGeorgetown: About.
What can be included?
The institutional repository (IR) is intended to host previously-published work from staff, final and cumulative degree papers, conference presentations, and Georgetown University peer-reviewed journals. The IR also publishes and disseminates graduate theses and dissertations, referred to as ETDs (please refer to the ETD submission process). Contact digitalscholarship@georgetown.edu for more information about services and depositing works.
Permission and format
Authors and units may submit works for which they are the sole rights holders, or for which they have obtained permission to submit from their co-authors. The conditions for submission to the repository are laid out in detail in the DigitalGeorgetown License Agreement. Generally, works published in the repository will be available to the general public and will be downloadable. Material should have a corresponding copyright statement attached and will need to be cited accordingly. More information on copyright is available through the copyright pages on the Library website.
The repository can host a wide range of digital materials such as PDF, MP4, MP3, datasets, and photo files. It is recommended that submissions come in an access-level-format. For guidance on this contact digitalscholarship@georgetown.edu. If a work does not have an affiliation with a Georgetown University unit, center, department, and is not a Georgetown University sponsored journal, it will not be hosted on DigitalGeorgetown.
Storage allocation and costs
Currently, the Digital Scholarship and Technology Services department adds material to DigitalGeorgetown free of charge. Materials in the repository are also stored in a preservation layer, managed by the Academic Preservation Trust. For more information on digital preservation see this libguide: Digital Preservation help.
How can you participate?
Individuals have the ability to submit work directly to DigitalGeorgetown and this work will be published if it meets criteria of the institutional repository. Departments, centers, and units may require more assistance to find the correct section of DigitalGeorgetown for their work. If the submission is the first from a certain department, center, or unit, please contact digitalscholarship@georgetown.edu. A short consultation will be scheduled to determine if the material is right for the repository, and if it is, a simple workflow will be determined.
Georgetown University policies
DigitalGeorgetown complies with University policies. The following are particularly relevant:
- Faculty handbook: Faculty Rights and Responsibilities
- Copyright in the information age
- Computer systems acceptable use policy
Units must ensure that the University's use of the work in the repository will not breach any other person’s intellectual property, privacy or other legal rights. If creation of the work was sponsored or supported by a party other than the University, or is based upon work that was sponsored or supported, authors must have complied with any prior-review or other obligations or requirements imposed by the sponsor agreement. As part of the submission process, authors will warrant that to the best of their knowledge, the work does not contain anything which is false, defamatory, unlawful, misleading or deceptive, or otherwise violates any law.
Author’s rights
The University does not seek to transfer rights from authors, nor does it intend to force a particular model of scholarly publication. In submitting their work to DigitalGeorgetown, contributors will grant to the University, on an item-by-item basis, a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to distribute their materials freely. This license does not limit author rights.
In order to submit works to DigitalGeorgetown, the author or creator must have the right to do so. The Library therefore strongly encourages researchers and authors to retain their rights, to negotiate with publishers, and to avail themselves of common tools, such as the Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine, to negotiate more rights to their own research. For more information, please refer to our page on Authors' Rights.
Copyright
As stated above, works submitted to the repository will comply with, and are subject to the University’s policies. More information on copyright is available through the Library's copyright pages. When considering the copyright status of a work, there are two common scenarios:
- Author owns all rights: If you retain full copyright to the work, you should be able to submit it to DigitalGeorgetown. Your work will receive increased visibility while raising the profile of Georgetown University.
- Publisher owns some, or all, rights: This situation occurs when authors sign an agreement with a publisher. Typically, such agreements will transfer some or all rights to the publisher. Publisher copyright policies will need to be checked to determine if, and in what form a work may be submitted to an institutional repository.