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Scholars' Bank Frequently Asked Questions


Scholars' Bank is a digital archive for the scholarly output of the University of Oregon community. Its mission is to preserve and make more widely available to the international scholarly community the intellectual output of the University of Oregon's faculty, staff, and students.

Below are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about Scholars' Bank. If you have a question which is not answered here, please contact the Scholars' Bank Steering Committee.

  1. Question: Doesn't posting my research in Scholars' Bank violate the copyright agreements that I have with the journals that publish my articles?

    Answer: As an author, any material you submit to Scholars' Bank remains under your copyright, unless you have signed that copyright away to another person or company. However, more and more publishers are recognizing authors' rights to post preprints of their work online; 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 Scholars' Bank without having to negotiate any special agreement with your publisher. For more information, consult the Copyright and Scholars' Bank page.

  2. Question: How is Scholars' Bank different from or better than my own Web site?

    Answer: Scholars' Bank 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 Libraries and the software take care of the rest.

  3. Question: Who determines what may be deposited in Scholars' Bank? Who sets the standards?

    Answer: In their Guidelines for Scholars' Bank Communities, the UO Libraries state:"The Scholars' Bank is a repository for scholarly literature, communication, and research results for University of Oregon faculty, staff, and students. Materials submitted should be of a scholarly nature, and should be the intellectual property of the author." Otherwise, it is the responsibility of a community to set standards for the material that authors may contribute. In setting up the infrastructure for a community, the Libraries will consult with community representatives about specific policies and access restrictions. It is up to a community's liaison to communicate standards to individual authors.

  4. Question: How does Scholars' Bank differ from a discipline-specific archive such as arXiv or RePEc?

    Answer: Materials submitted to Scholars' Bank will be identified at the top level as being part of the University of Oregon's scholarly output. Since Scholars' Bank 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. Additionally, Scholars' Bank charges no fees for deposit or access to its content,

  5. Question: Who has access to material stored in Scholars' Bank? What materials are restricted, why, and to whom?

    Answer: Individual communities set the policies regarding access to materials in their collections. The Libraries will work with a community's representative(s) to set up the necessary infrastructure in support of those policies. The software allows contributors to limit access to items in Scholars' Bank. Contact the Scholars Bank Steering Committee at scholars@uoregon.edu for more information.

  6. Question: How does someone establish a community?

    Answer: Individual faculty, academic departments, or programs may establish a community by contacting the Scholars Bank Steering Committee at scholars@uoregon.edu to discuss what is desired for the community. Some of the issues to be discussed include the types of materials to be submitted, the average size of individual files, whether or not the community desires 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. Additional information is available in the Guidelines for Scholars' Bank Communities.

  7. Question: How does someone actually submit materials to Scholars' Bank?

    Answer: If your community has authorized you to submit materials to Scholars' Bank, you can follow the detailed instructions available on the Submitting to Scholars' Bank page. We also recommend that you review the process by looking at the local step-by-step guide to submission.

  8. Question: How do I decide which terms to use to describe my submission?

    Answer: Each community sets its own standards regarding the use of specific terms to be used to describe individual submissions. While the Libraries recommends the use of a list of controlled terms to improve the precision of searching within a collection, there are no requirements for using such a list. If you would like assistance in this area, please contact the Scholars' Bank Steering Committee at scholars@uoregon.edu or 346-5607.

  9. Question: What is open access and how does it relate to Scholars' Bank?

    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 licence 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.*

    Scholars' Bank 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. For more information on the open access movement, consult the Open Access News & Overview page.

    *(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)

  10. Question: What is the policy of the National Institutes of Health and other federal funding agencies on open access to scholarly research?

    Answer: Federal funding agencies have begun to require quick, open access to research supported by federal funds. On July 14, 2004, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee adopted a set of recommendations for next year's federal budget. One key recommendation would have the effect of providing open access to articles based on research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The key provisions from the report include:

    • Articles based on NIH-funded research must be deposited in PubMed Central (PMC) at the time they are accepted by a peer-reviewed journal for publication.
    • PMC will provide open access to the article six months after the article is published.
    • The committee directs NIH to submit a plan by December 1, 2004, to implement this recommendation in FY 2005.

    On September 3, 2004, the NIH released its plan, Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information, for a 60 day period of public comment ending on November 2. On September 17, 2004, the NIH published the same text in the Federal Register, for another 60 day period of public comment ending on November 16. For more information on the NIH proposal and what it means to researchers, visit Peter Suber's web site.

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Maintained by the Scholars' Bank Steering Committee: scholars@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 08/24/2006