FAQ Scholars' Bank

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

Please contact us with any questions not addressed below.

Does posting my research in Scholars' Bank violate the copyright agreements that I have with the journals that publish my articles?

Many commercial publishers recognize authors' rights to post preprints and/or postprints of their work online, also known as self-archiving. To determine where your publisher stands on the issue:

Will I still own my work if I post it to Scholars' Bank?

Authors who submit their research to Scholars' Bank retain their copyright unless they explicitly give it away to a third party. The University of Oregon Libraries does not seek nor claim copyright on work submitted to Scholars' Bank. The Libraries ask authors to agree to a non-exclusive distribution license, which means that authors may make copies of their work available on other sites or formally publish their work without obtaining permission from the Libraries.

Authors may specify conditions on the re-use of their materials in Scholars' Bank by choosing a customized Creative Commons License. The author may reserve all rights.

Learn more about licensing your work or contact the Institutional Repository Manager.

How is Scholars' Bank different from or better than my own Web site?

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, guarantee that your materials will be preserved and migrated to new formats as needed, and provide a stable URL that facilitates citation of your work.

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

Materials submitted to Scholars' Bank are identified as 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 through a discipline-specific archive. Scholars' Bank charges no fees for deposit or access to its content.

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

Scholars' Bank is an open access archive, although the platform allows contributors or communities to limit access to items in Scholars' Bank. Access restrictions to files are allowed in exceptional circumstances, and granted for a limited time on a case-by-case basis.

How does Scholars' Bank preserve my work?

As far as resources and technology permit, the University of Oregon Libraries will take steps to ensure that the files deposited in Scholars' Bank survive uncorrupted and continue to be usable. The steps taken to ensure long term viability of the materials include:

  • nightly production of ASCII text backup, when possible, for those files that are text-based
  • nightly incremental backup of files and metadata to the Libraries' mass storage unit
  • bi-weekly backup from the mass storage unit to tape
  • bi-monthly export of the metadata and directory structure as a tar file to another system
  • storage of magnetic tapes outside of the main library building
  • conversion of some file formats upon deposit to more secure file formats
  • periodic checking of file integrity to avoid data corruption
  • monitoring the technological environment to prepare for file migration as file formats become obsolete or the software needed to run them becomes unavailable

Because the technological environment is changing rapidly, it may not be possible to preserve the usability of every file format that is deposited in Scholars' Bank. The University of Oregon Libraries will make a good-faith effort to maintain the viability of the materials deposited in Scholars' Bank or return them to their authors if unable to do so.

How do I submit materials to Scholars' Bank?

Scholars' Bank is organized into communities corresponding to different organizations or academic departments on campus. These communities are further divided into collections, which contain items. While most submissions are made by Scholars' Bank staff or a departmental representative, any registered member of an existing community in Scholars' Bank may submit appropriate items to the community's collections.

  1. Users join through the registration form, supplying a complete email address such as jdoe@uoregon.edu. First-time users will receive a confirmation email, allowing them to set their account password. After completing registration, contact scholars@uoregon.edu to gain access to a particular collection or community.
  2. After accessing the selected collection, submit an item by supplying information in the submission form and upload file(s) when prompted. By providing descriptive information (metadata), search engines and humans will better be able to discover the item.
  3. For assistance submitting materials to the archive, contact the Institutional Repository Manager for a brief training session. We can provide training for your departmental representative or other submitters or handle submissions on your behalf.
  4. Some collections require that new submissions be reviewed by a member of the sponsoring community. In that case, individual users will see their submissions appear in Scholars' Bank after review.

What is open access and how does it relate to Scholars' Bank?

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

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.

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" and the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities")