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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 disseminate the intellectual output of the University of Oregon's faculty, staff, and students.

Please contact us with any questions not addressed below.

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. For more information, consult the Copyright and Scholars' Bank page.
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, in a few minutes you can make your research available, register it as your intellectual property, provide searchable indexing and abstracts, 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.
Question: Who determines what may be deposited in Scholars' Bank? Who sets the standards?
Answer: "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." It is the responsibility of a community to set additional standards for the material that authors may contribute.
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. Scholars' Bank charges no fees for deposit or access to its content.
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 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 Coordinator at scholars@uoregon.edu for more information.
Question: How does someone establish a community?
Answer: Individual faculty, academic departments, or programs may establish a community by contacting the Scholars Bank Steering Coordinator at scholars@uoregon.edu. Some of the issues to be discussed include the types of materials to be submitted, 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.
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.
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 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.*

Scholars' Bank, a repository which supports the open access publishing model, is dedicated to 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)

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Maintained by the Scholar's Bank Coordinator: scholars@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 05/17/2011